Hey everyone, Alex Wolfe has agreed to host my IT blog in the Digital Life channel of InformationWeek's blogger network.
For the time being, I won't have my own channel there, although that might come eventually, but please subscribe to that channel to keep reading my thoughts on Enterprise IT and how it connects to the world we live in.
One of the best things about the offline functionality for Gmail that Google is rolling out is that it won't require users to download any new applications.
Built with Google's Gears developer language, it works within the browser, which users can of course open even if they find themselves without an Internet connection.
Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail. As long as you're connected to the network, that cache is synchronized with Gmail's servers. When you lose your connection, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored on your computer's hard drive instead of the information sent across the network. You can read messages, star and label them, and do all of the things you're used to doing while reading your webmail online. Any messages you send while offline will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection.
Not only does this level the playing field for corporate Google App users who have been eyeballing customers of Zoho and Yahoo Zimbra jealously for months, it also helps SMBs and SoHos which use free Google products and have been limping along with an online-only client.
Image via CrunchBaseAutonomy, a U.K.-based enterprise search firm that specializes in e-discovery, had a particularly good fourth quarter, according to the Financial Times.
Revenues for the year to December 31 rose 47 per cent to $503m (£366m), while pre-tax profit doubled to $185m. Basic earnings per share doubled to $0.61 and cash balances at the end of the year rose from $92.6m to $199m.
For all the railing about how Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory demands are a drain on corporate resources, it looks like they can be a boon if you're positioned to take advantage.
I'm joking (a little), because companies that aren't in the business of providing tech solutions to government hurdles do have to spend--but even there, I'd argue that more transparency is good for management and good for investors.
Back to Autonomy, things are going so well that it acquired Interwoven, a U.S.-based company with a strong position in the U.S. legal market.
The Obama administration is going to create even more opportunities for tech companies to provide services to other sectors of the economy, especially in the financial and health care sectors.
If you want your organization to get ahead, or if you want to get credit for showing it the way forward, think about what your organization can do to take advantage of this swing while the opportunity is still there.
Image via WikipediaIBM has tried to revive Lotus through many incarnations (Dual Highway, Workplace, Sametime) and has by many accounts (including mine) improved the product markedly.
The issue isn't whether the product is good. The issue is whether it's relevant. First, how many people outside IBM even use Lotus? Market share is a real issue. If your business partners use Facebook, what's the point of using Quickr or Connections? It strikes me as rather solipsistic.
The other, related, problem, is that Facebook (and LinkedIn, to name two) are free, and freely chosen by its intended audience--oh yeah, the users.
That is the essential problem for IBM--it has no users to speak of -- for Lotus.
Mike Gotta puts it nice and starkly for IBM, even as he paints this year's Lotusphere as a chance to make Lotus relevant to the larger enterprise market:
Yes, individual products are improving and individual teams behind those products are more energized (namely the Lotus Sametime and Connections teams) - but having a few products improve is not going to deliver the type of tipping point IBM needs in the market.
Even adding features like a LinkedIn plug-in is irrelevant when users will pluck tools off the Web like fruit from a tree, rather than getting stale versions at the supermarket.
IBM can continue to try and put lipstick on its software pig, but it will still smell like a piece of adjunct functionality to a legacy enterprise application of yore.
IBM should do the right thing and use next year's Lotusphere as a platform for selling Notes to a company capable of making it exciting and, most of all, free. Free from its IBM legacy and free of cost as well.
Image by The Opportunity Agenda via FlickrEveryone agrees (even right-wing doctors like my father-in-law) that the health care system is such a mess, it shouldn't even be called a system. It's more like a health-care dystopia.
People have to cart their hand-written health care records from one hospital to another, care-givers are sucked into a morass of complex and non-interoperable payment systems, and patients have little or no visibility into the chaos.
It's refreshing to see that people like John Halamka, who is a practicing technologist in the health care field, is actually inspired rather than daunted by the challenge.
Customers badly need Fusion in order to cobble together the patchwork of applications that Oracle has acquired over the years. Tellingly, Kurian also promises that "no customers will be pushed or forced to move to Fusion if they don't want to."
A software vendor that doesn't force its customers to do something--now that's a novelty! You wonder when Larry Ellison had the epiphany that customers actually have a say in these matters.
Kurian said Oracle has stayed consistent with its plan, and built applications -- including financial apps, human resources, supply change management, procurement, and human capital management -- that combine the best functionality from the many applications it now sells, including JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and its own Oracle E-Business Suite.
The software will be offered in a full product suite sometime after the beta program is completed, but also can be adopted as individual apps. Kurian said Oracle hopes customers will adopt the full Fusion suite and gain application integration advantages in doing so, but that decision will be left to customers.
Despite all the goodness, though, "a 2009 beta likely means it will be at least 2010 or 2011 before Fusion is available to all of its customers."
I'm amazed we didn't have one already. Barack Obama is hiring Nancy Killefer, a McKinsey consultant, as the country's first "chief performance officer" to see if she can't help rub out inefficiency in government.
According to CNN Money:
As chief performance officer, a newly created position, Killefer will work to restore fiscal order by scrubbing the federal budget and reforming government.
I thought that's what the Office of Management and Budget was for. I guess the founding fathers actually expected Congress to do that for itself, but government has gotten much bigger than 538 bickering reps can handle.
I'm sure the announcement has the likes of SAS and Oracle licking their chops, but as with any kind of BI implementation, the real challenge is going to be finding which systems contain which data and figuring out a way of centralizing and creating meaningful reports from all that.
So good luck Ms. Killefer--with all the tax dollars we're going to be spending in the next few years, we really wish you the best.
Looking for the intersections of media, information technology, culture and politics. I've covered enterprise technology and finance for the better part of ten years. I used to own an American diner in France!
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