If you are interested in virtualization, VAR Business has a good high level article.  What I like is the relatively clear discussion of traditional VM architectures (like VMWare and Microsoft), versus the new hypervisor method (also VMWare and XenSource).

Oddly, the biggest challenge in virtualization is management.  That may seem like an obvious statement (isn’t it always managing the stuff that is difficult?), but it is truly amazing how far the technical side has progressed.  Imagine running Microsoft Office via Remote Desktop in a virtual Advanced Server 2003 that is really running on a 4 CPU server that is also running 7 other VMs of various flavors of Linux.  The fact that the biggest challenge is keeping track of where the server is and how to access it says a tremendous amount about the quality of virtualization technology!

A close runner-up to management, by the way, is licensing.  Deploying software into a virtualized environment is as challenging for the people buying licenses as it is for the system administrators.  Some companies, notably Microsoft, have tried to address this — but they have large, and justifiable, concerns about what virtualization might do to license revenues.

Some years are so busy, I can only remember the last quarter or so….  I strolled down my personal work memory lane by cleaning out email, and for the industry as a whole reading this very concise eWeek article.  Enjoy.

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Will the proprietary world of MQ Series and TIBCO Rendezvous be assailed by open standards, as have so many other lucrative enterprise software niches? It is a decided possibility. I listened in to an interesting webinar yesterday with speakers from JP Morgan Chase and Iona Technologies, discussing the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol, which is a standardization effort aimed at addressing the problem of incompatibilities of the various asynchronous messaging products widely used today (e.g. MQ Series, TIBCO, webMethods, as well as many JMS implementations). The effort seems to have an interesting group of supporters. Read the rest of this entry »

If there is one thing no one likes, it’s tattle tales…  and one of the biggest in the business world is GDSN, the Global Data Synchronization Network — or more specifically the process of implementing GDSN.  In my last post, I wrote a little about the sorry state of product data quality and wrapped up with the fact that most companies had learned to live with it until GDSN.

Briefly, the Global Data Synchronization Network is a group of interconnected data-pools (services that operate large “catalogs” of product information for purposes of sharing it between manufacturers/CPGs and retailers or others that need it) who share a common set of standards and utilize a Global Registry, all of which is under the stewardship of GS1.  Basically, it is an effort on the part of multiple industries to leverage standards to manage the process of “data alignment”, the seemingly simple task of ensuring multiple companies have identical values for product data they share (e.g. height of a bottle of window cleaner, number of items in a case, etc).  GDSN is a wonderful system, and I will write an entry later — but for now, know that it was an earthquake in the world of data quality…. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes, very rarely, I visit the press releases section of our official website.  I say this not because it is not a source of tremendous information (note to readers, the same group is tasked with monitoring this blog….), but because GXS is really good about internal communication, so it is not necessary to know what is going on.  But sometimes it is really interesting to read the external communications, for instance . . .

“The consequences of poor data quality are well-known and pervasive in the retail and CPG industry.  Data quality is critical, but is only one rung on the ladder of complete end-to-end data synchronisation,”

Okay.  Read the rest of this entry »