Briefings Direct

As established enterprise IT expectations meet up with cutting-edge cloud delivery models, there's a clear need for additional trust and maturity in order for enterprises to further adopt cloud-based services. Enterprise IT expectations on visibility, control, and security to software as a service (SaaS), and cloud-based applications delivery need tools that manage the applications use and the use patterns for providers. This podcast examines how one SaaS provider, Innotas, has developed a more matured view into services operations and application programming interfaces (APIs) and how they can extend the benefits from that visibility to their customers. We'll hear how Innotas, an on-demand project portfolio management (PPM) service, derives more analytics from network activity and thereby provide mounting confidence in how services are performing. To better understand how Innotas has used solutions from Sonoa Systems to provide better managed services based on service level agreements (SLAs), BriefingsDIrect's Dana Gardner recently interviewed Tim Madewell, vice president of operations at Innotas, as well as Chet Kapoor, CEO of Sonoa Systems. Listen here or read a full transcript of the discussion at: http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2009/01/visibility-and-control-over-use-and.html. Sponsor: Sonoa Systems.

Welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 36, a periodic discussion and dissection of software, services, SOA and compute cloud-related news and events with a panel of IT analysts. In this episode, recorded Jan. 12, 2009, our guests examine what keeps SOA alive and vibrant, the ability for the architectural approach to grow inclusive of service types like service-oriented communications (SOC). We also visit the purported demise of large-scale SOA to calibrate the life span of SOA -- dead or alive? Please join noted IT industry analysts and experts Todd Landry, vice president of NEC Sphere; Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research; Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum; Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and prolific blogger; Dave Linthicum, founder of Linthicum Group; JP Morgenthal, senior analyst at Burton Group, and Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group. Our discussion is hosted and moderated by BriefingDirect's Dana Gardner. Read a full transcript of the podcast: http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2009/01/briefingsdirect-analysts-discuss.html. Charter sponsor: Active Endpoints. Additional underwriting: TIBCO Software.

When large businesses need to change fast, the IT systems need to do more than keep up with change -- they need to manage, define and secure it. Multiple enterprise systems of record that must quickly operate together as result of mergers and acquisitions are being effectively orchestrated using IT repositories. Using such repositories, IT and business assets that need to be quickly federated and integrated can be brought into alignment and managed via policies and governance definitions, even in far-flung operations. To better understand the value and opportunity in using IT repositories to manage change in complex business environments, BriefingsDIrect's Dana Gardner recently defined a case study at Wachovia, which is now merging with Wells Fargo. The case study emerges in a discussion Gardner has here with Harry Karr and Hemesh Yadav, both IT architects at Wachovia. Listen or read a full transcript of the discussion at: http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2009/01/it-repositories-help-financial-giant.html. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Bringing more enterprise data to the mobile tier has been a thorny problem for many years now. This podcast examines innovative ways to extract and make enterprise data ready to be accessed and consumed by mobile device users. Kapow Technologies is focusing on the Web browser on the mobile device to allow data to be much more efficiently delivered via mobile networks beyond the limited range of traditional enterprise applications. To provide an in-depth look at how more enterprises and their data can be packaged and delivered effectively to more users, BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner spoke to JP Finnell, CEO of Mobility Partners, a wireless mobility consulting firm; Stefan Andreasen, founder and chief technology officer at Kapow Technologies, and Ron Yu, head of marketing at Kapow. Read a full transcript of the discussion at: http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2009/01/enterprises-seek-new-ways-to-package.html. Sponsor: Kapow Technologies.

Internet-scale data gathering, swarms of sensors outputs, and content signals from the mobile device fabric -- as well as enterprises piling up ever more kinds of metadata to analyze -- have stretched traditional data-management models to the breaking point. Yet advances in parallel processing using multi-core chipsets have prompted new software approaches such as MapReduce that can handle these data chores at surprisingly low total cost. What are the technical underpinnings that support the new demands being placed on, and by, extreme data sets? What economies of scale can we anticipate? To provide a technical look at how parallelism, modern data infrastructure, and MapReduce technologies come together, BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner spoke with Joe Hellerstein, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley; Robin Bloor, analyst at Hurwitz & Associates, and Luke Lonergan, CTO and co-founder at Greenplum. Read a full transcript of the discussion at: http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/2009/01/technical-look-at-how-parallel.html. Sponsor: Greenplum.