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Back in the mid-1990s, then Microsoft CEO Bill Gates offered a prophetic observation. The impact of the Web, he wrote, would be greater than most people thought, but would take longer to happen than was commonly supposed. Turns out, happily for Microsoft, that he was right. Yet now, perhaps not so...

Salesforce.com at its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco today debuted a database in the cloud service, Database.com, that combines attractive heterogeneous features for a virtual data tier for developers of all commercial, technical and open source persuasions. Salesforce.com is upping the ante...

They say we have big brains because we have all needed to work better together over the past 150,000 years. The more people work together, the more tools they need to make collaboration a productive art, rather than a befuddled mess. Rather than wait for human evolution to keep up the pace, Salesfor...

Salesforce.com's buy of Jigsaw is the latest, most indicative market mover in the transition to a lead generation economy. Twitter's forays into a sponsored tweets business model announced last week at Chirp is another. Yahoo selling its soul to Microsoft for Bing is another. And just about everythi...

In an effort to provide needed cohesion across its products and solutions, IBM has unveiled a cloud-based BPM service, tighter alignment with Amazon, better CEP integration, reintroduced a WebSphere private cloud appliance and double-downed on a slew of its industry framework solutions. Under the um...

Amazon's announcement of a cloud-based data mining and analysis service, using the eHadoop implementation of MapReduce, potentially opens advanced business intelligence activities to many more businesses and organizations. It's an excellent example of just how much cloud computing can change the w...

In what could best be termed a photo finish, Greenplum and Aster Data Systems have both announced that they have integrated MapReduce into their massively parallel processing database engines. MapReduce, pioneered by Google for analyzing the Web, now becomes available to enterprises and service prov...

On-demand applications and cloud computing often mean different things to different people. For developers, Software as a Service 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 pote...

How good is the match between Software AG and its recent acquisition webMethods? Was is strictly a geographical sales force synergy? Or will webMethods become the de facto R&D arm of Software AG while the parent firm's legacy cash flow sustains the movement toward service-oriented architecture? ...

How do SOA and Web 2.0 services come together? Are we entering an era where a variety of business services from a spectrum of sources contribute to and perhaps dominate new business process aggregation? If so, won't that require a level of governance to protect enterprises from flighty Web-based ser...

Perhaps a savvy political operative tasked with designing the best go-to-market campaign for 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 tryi...