SOA & Web Services

By J Schwan

Too often the Buy vs. Build argument gets turned on its head when enterprises who buy a packaged solution to save money, end up spending more customizing it to fit their business' needs. When I say packaged here I am referring to things like ERPs, CRMs and even newer SaaS based applications. Customizing packaged apps is expensive since you often need proprietary skills and knowledge to make any changes. It gets even more expensive when it comes time to upgrade and many of those customizations need to be refactored or rewritten.

News hot off the wires is that Google is about to purchase the leading mobile ads vendor (besides Google itself), Admob .

The companies say that this new business Linux desktop will offer a 50% savings over Windows 7 while running on existing hardware.

Ariba's Tim Minahan thinks that SaaS is transforming the CIO into a "best practice business assembler." But while SaaS may have transformed Ariba, the jury is still out on whether or not cloud computing will transform IT.

The Active Sync 'end round' that Google used to get calendar and contact sync to work on the iPhone is now being used to get push Gmail. Here's how:

In today's podcast: Motorola banks on Cliq; Microsoft forms open source foundation; Apple issues more patches.

Google is firing up a Google Apps campaign to try to convince small and medium businesses in four metropolitan areas (New York, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago) to "go Google". They've set up a special site called "Apps At Work" for the campaign.

One veteran software development executive sees services-oriented architecture as undermining the long-held man-month myth in programming projects.

The new commands will allow the platform to do things like serve apps that create new Twitter tweets.

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The idea of working with online apps rather with locally-installed software is no longer revolutionary. In fact, it's slowly becoming a fact of life -- so much so, that it may not be long before you won't have much of a choice as to whether you work online or not.

In today's podcast: EU ruling on Intel could launch civil suits, HP recalls laptop batteries, Google blames routing error for outage.

Google fouled up its own network, so would you trust them, or anyone else, with your applications.

Google is hitting the airwaves this weekend with a flurry of television advertising.

They hope to position the Chrome Browser against Firefox, Safari, Opera but mostly against Internet Explorer which still holds a strong majority of the Browser market share, even theough it has fallen in recent years. Chrome is currently in fourth place just above Opera, according to NetApplications data.

See the commercials pasted below.

Google beat earnings forecasts for the first quarter ended March 31 despite a global recession that is affecting the company's main revenue engine, online advertising.

If you still think Ubuntu is just this cute little Linux for Linux fans, boy do you have a surprise waiting for you in Ubuntu Server 9.04.