Articles by Dana Gardner

What is the state of B2B (business-to-business) search marketing? What are the business and technology drivers that make online search an emerging tool for business discovery and procurement? I put these and other questions to Forrester Research Senior Analyst Shar VanBoskirk and to Bryan Burdick, chief operating officer at ZoomInfo, to explore the...

How mature is service-oriented architecture? In asking that question, it's important to make the distinction between the best-of-breed approach, where one picks and chooses various components within one's own SOA arsenal, or a more complete suite, a holistic full-feature set with the benefits, trade-offs and detriments of each of these approaches D...

Information technology service management (ITSM) -- how IT is delivered inside an enterprise as a service -- and a related area, the quickly evolving Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), form complementary trends that are helping to mature IT as a customer-focused, quality-of-service activity IT departments are under mounting press...

Musical tastes are not easy to classify with just a few tags. What gets one person's foot tapping and their heart thumping is not going to win over their cousin necessarily. Moods also swing or swoon to a fickle beat, and the music you may want to match or detach your mood can't be easily conjured from a rudimentary playlist or a limited catalog It...

SOA is like an orchestra, a root system, a 30-mile wide fungus, an amoeba, a 1930s Hollywood movie studio and perhaps an independent film built from a loosely coupled team. It's an intellectually wild, yet illuminating, ride Recently, I sat down with a panel of analysts -- independent industry analyst Steve Garone, research consultant Joe McKendric...

Now that media companies are exploring Web distribution models and using new technologies, a great deal is being discussed about who controls what when it comes to content. Digital rights management (DRM) has its advocates and detractors, but some type of gateway for the management and monetization of content appears inevitable Business development...

We are at a very important juncture in the evolution of service-oriented architecture. An incredibly important issue right now is whether we are going to win broad acceptance and deep penetration, or whether SOA remains somewhat marginal There are a number of things going on in the market that deserve examination. Trends and developments in informa...

Remember when AOL thought it was doing the world's researchers a big favor and made a boatload of online user behavior data openly available? Remember the unintended consequences?...

It took about an hour before I finally switched from thinking that my initial experiences with Second Life were a waste of time, to actually finding them being productive in new ways I was one of a 3D flurry of invited "VIPs" to enter an IBM pavilion inside Second Life. With my unique personage avatar seated (it took me five minutes to figure out h...

Have you heard what a certain software company has been saying about next-generation IT development and deployment strategies? There's this gem about service-oriented architecture: SOA "is not about a product or skill, but rather it's about style of how one comes up with a system." Or: SOA should allow "basic approaches [for] replacing or rewriting...

Perhaps a savvy political operative tasked with designing the best go-to-market campaign for SOA (service-oriented architecture) would proclaim: "It's the applications, stupid!" Focusing on the applications -- and not the means to achieving them -- has served computing well over the decades. I recall trying to run a global newsroom -- with some 15 ...