Stories by Paul Krill

Get a head start on the next tech boom by hacking together tomorrow’s Internet of Things hit today

From Java to SPARC, critical Sun technologies have lived on, been cut loose, or lost their luster in the four years since the Oracle acquisition

With more employees using smartphones and tablets for business, enterprises are setting up their own app stores for application distribution, leveraging a consumer model for mobile application access that is tuned to the workplace. Instead of saddling already overburdened IT personnel with getting applications to individual devices, these app stores provide a central distribution mechanism for employees to download applications themselves.

IT departments in the age of mobile computing must adapt to newly empowered users who select not only their own devices but their applications as well. This adapation -- as difficult as it may seem -- has a strong benefit: Enabling a modern workforce, said Maribel Lopez, president of Lopez Research at the AppNation conference last week in San Francisco.

It is still early in the year, but cloud computing already is shaping up as a key trend for 2009.

Expressing a now-familiar theme, a Microsoft executive at the ApacheCon conference on Friday morning touted Microsoft's efforts to be more open, highlighting moves such as offering the company's "M" modeling language under the Microsoft "Open Specification Promise."

Enterprises are facing an exploding "culture of connectivity," with global information workers using an increasing number of devices and applications, according to an IDC study released this week.

With Sun Microsystems' US$1 billion acquisition of open source database vendor MySQL announced, Sun gets ownership of a major player in the open-source software industry while MySQL gets the backing of a multibillion-dollar, established systems company.

While technology and the setting of policies often are cited as critical to SOA governance, an HP official Thursday emphasized another key factor: Having the right personnel.

Boosting its Solaris OS, Sun Microsystems plans to distribute the PostgreSQL open source database with Solaris and will enable Red Hat Linux binaries to run unmodified on the OpenSolaris open source version of the operating system.

Borland Software is in a peculiar spot when it comes to offering tools for developing Windows applications.

Power in computing has shifted from proprietary, Microsoft APIs to URLs on the Web and content provision, Google Vice President Adam Bosworth said during the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo on Friday.

Sun Microsystems president and COO Jonathan Schwartz on Thursday cited the company's plans to eventually offer all of its software for free as a way to build communities around its technologies.

Contrary to a report published in 2003, IT still does matter, BMC Software CTO Tom Bishop said at the BMC Remedy User Group 2005 conference on Wednesday morning.

Apache officials hope to iron out licensing issues with Microsoft and IBM pertaining to the WS-Security specification so that Apache can add the technology to its open source Axis SOAP stack.