IT vendors: The good, the bad, and the ugly
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The industry with no shame Reg Technology Panel It's been well over a year since we asked for your views on the organisations you buy IT products and services from. But today sees the welcome return of our The Good, The Bad and The Ugly Vendor survey.â¦
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Smaller, lighter and cheaper is the order of the day for laptop vendors as they struggle to find new types of devices that will appeal to users.
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As the number of vendors touting hosted applications grows and the sophistication of their offerings increases, the choice between hosted solutions and on-premise solutions is no longer just a debate between competing vendors. Itâs become a real internal discussion within the enterprise.
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Blog: Roy Russo argues that open source vendors are monopolies waiting to happen.  Here's why he's wrong.
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Buy high or low? The tale of sales offers some insight.
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Some reseller partners of security appliance vendor IronPort Systems are taking the good with the not so good. IronPort partners like Peter Kolb, director of data sales at Triple A Networks, a technology integrator
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IT management? We're listening Reg Reader Studies It won't have escaped your attention that the IT management space is quite a hot topic right now - or at least it is if you listen to IT vendors.â¦
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Security pros have their say Anti-Virus vendorsâ¦
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The plethora of security technologies on the market is enough to overwhelm even the most knowledgeable IT managers, but in sorting through all of the options, it may be helpful to look at what is not needed.
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How bad is the Monster.com data breach? Bad enough. Did the crooks get their hooks in deep? Remarkably deep. Gregg Keizer has the details on what has gone wrong so far in the Infostealer.Monstres attack.
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'Shorty' kicks blades out of the data center and onto the floor The mid-market push has definitely been heating up for tech vendors in recent weeks. We've already seen Dell, IBM and Hitachi touting their simplified server and storage lines with SMB-aimed gear, and frankly, we're starting to recite the hard sell for companies with limited budgets and expertise in our sleep.â¦
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IT vendors are championing highly integrated and flexible systems through offerings such as IBM's 'on-demand computing' initiative and HP's 'adaptive enterprise' strategy. But what's really important, users say, is support for open standards.
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In 1980, I signed a deal with a company to market a product I was developing. The contract required me to turn over the source code, which I did. One day I went to a meeting at the office of the company, and there on the product manager's desk, right next to a door that opened to the outside, was a floppy labeled "Dave Winer's source code" in big letters.  If you own a Mac you may soon find out what that felt like. It's amazing to me that the tech blogosphere doesn't treat Apple's policy re broken hard disks as the huge gaping security hole that it is.  Think about it. We worry about bad people getting their hands on little pieces of data that, when added together, give them the power to be you in banking and credit transactions.  Think about what you would do if your laptop was stolen. Well, if you own a Mac and its hard disk goes bad, and you make the mistake of bringing it to Apple for service, you will turn over all that data to Apple. Not "may" or "might" but "will." What Apple in turn does with that data is none of your affair. They don't sign anything or offer any guarantees that they won't sell the disk to a data miner. Think it can't happen or that it's unlikely? I don't gain much comfort from your feeling of security. I've been writing about this issue since December 22. Usually when I write something critical of Apple, the results are mixed. Some people are supportive, but far more people attack. This time the ratio is very different. Almost everyone who has commented gets that there's a huge problem here. Can we solve this problem? Of course we can.  Some say that other vendors do this too. That gives me less comfort, not more. That means there's no escaping this crazy way of treating user's confidentiality. Ultimately it hurts the vendors because people can't use their computers for things the manufacturers say we can.  Further, it's got to be an issue for the banks, brokerage firms, credit agencies. If you are a newspaper and you employ reporters and they use a computer, how exactly are you guarding the confidentiality of your sources? If you're a confidential source, don't you have an interest when the reporter gives their computer manufacturer all their data to do with as they please? Imagine what you would do if it turned out there was a bug in a Netgear or Linksys router that allowed, under special circumstances, a mailicous person to gain access to the full content of your hard disk at any time. Would you have a problem with that? This is worse than Microsoft's neglect of malware that got me to stop using their computers. In that case it was Microsoft being neglegent. This time Apple itself is the cause of the problem. It's as if they planted a virus in their operating system that entitled them, under special circumstances, completely out of the user's control, to gain access to everything on your disk, with as much time as they want, with no way for you to prevent or even detect the intrusion.  See also: My letter to Steve Jobs.
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The Story: With three of the largest competitors in the field taken over by software giants, you?d think that the best days of the business intelligence market were over. You?d be wrong.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    Far from heralding the death of BI, the loss of Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion to SAP, IBM and Oracle may well signal ?a golden age for business intelligence,? says AMR Research analyst John Hagerty.Sure, that?s a brave statement. But the BI market has never been as narrow as many people assumed. There are significant players left, including SAS, SPSS, MicroStrategy, Actuate, and dozens of smaller, often specialized, vendors. ?Go beyond the core tools of reporting and analysis and you?ll see lots of data-mining and statistical tool vendors, as well as industry-specific developers,? says IDC analyst Dan Vesset.The acquisitions of the big guys now creates space for those other companies to flourish, says Rob Tholemeier, a former industry analyst turned private investor. The same thing happened to the database market, he notes: ?There are more database companies around now than when Informix was purchased.? BI, Tholemeier says, is likely to follow the same course. ?Innovation will come from the outside [companies] as the big guys expand their scale and scope,? concurs AMR?s Hagerty. Pricing, of course, is a major concern as markets consolidate. But because the supply of BI software is still ample, given the large number of independents, buyers still have significant leverage, says Vesset ? though that could change further out, he adds. Moreover, it will take the platform vendors some time to integrate their acquisitions, both in terms of code and business process. And while that process plays out, prices aren?t likely to spike.The Bottom Line: As investor Tholmeier puts it, ?Clearing out the old-timers leaves a huge vacuum for the dozens of innovative players ready to strut their stuff. The business intelligence industry is dead. Long live BI.? That change presents both a challenge for IT to understand the new BI, and the opportunity to drive BI?s benefits to a greater portion of the company.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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Vendors worry about the impact on their own businesses. Also: Satellite radio car competition & hellip;. A Chinese car powered by bleach & hellip;. and more.
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It appears software vendors and their customers are at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to newfangled licensing techniques.
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As more computer buyers turn to laptops, lesser-known companies that produce PCs will have a hard time keeping up with the big guys.Photos: White-box choices