"Asking questions instead of arguing is a rhetorical technique that scales very well."

Local Instance Networking by Silver Peak

These appliances are designed to provide high performance IT services to remote offices from a central datacenter, i.e. without having local server infrastructure. Instead of just doing compression and QoS like conventional WAN optimization appliances, Silver Peak goes a step further by analyzing the network traffic on a byte level and by detecting recurring byte patterns. Those byte patterns are cached locally on disks. This is similar to the WAFS approach (wide area file system), however they are not optimizing on the application layer but on the networking / packet layer. They call this approach "Network Memory". They even support high availability deployment (1+1 for N+1 with failover and load-balancing). In addition they support compression, per-application QoS, and "latency and loss mitigation". I have no idea how "latency mitigation" works ... They support inline deployment / bridge mode(between Ethernet LAN and WAN-Router) or out-of-path deployment (router mode) where only some traffic is routed through the appliance.

QlikView

Think outside the cube - an interesting new approach to BI.

Vanco -

Interesting Business Modell: a virtual global network operator

QA at Microsoft

"we share your pain" :-)

March of the Pengiuns / Die Reise der Pinguine

This is a candidate for the most beautiful movie I've ever seen.

The German Website has breathtaking pictures.

IMDB Rating 8.0

Umkreissuche

Webservices:

• http://www.microsoft.com/mappoint/products/webservice/default.mspx
• http://www.ims-server.de/cms/typo/Webservices.umkreissuche.0.html
• http://www.edith-distance.de/

Open Source:

• http://opengeodb.hoppe-media.com/

Commercial:

• http://www.killetsoft.de/

Interessante Infos Thema:

• http://www.aspforum.de/topic.asp?ARCHIVE=true&TOPIC_ID=18216&SearchTerms=Umkreissuche
• http://www.koordinaten.de/online/

TERACOM_ ORLANDO

"eine flexible Runtime Development Plattform zur Individualentwicklung"

sounds interesting

Radical promise of BPM

BPM systems provide the same infrastructure capability as an RDBMS, but applied to application processes rather than simply data.

"The reason people are thinking of and implementing BPM is that they face a host of process related issues. That's similar to what happened with data because it all became embedded in applications, and people said there had to be a better way of managing the data. But now applications have become the problem, with business process fragments locked away in stovepipe applications, and people want a better way to manage end-to-end processes. The IT litter across the organization has become so voluminous that people are looking for a way to renormalize it and put it into a standard form."

IT Value

"A CIO has to look at a network of separate variables that affect IT effectiveness. At the top level they are business alignment, process maturity, technical architecture, and human performance.

The CEO has a different perspective: All he or she usually cares about is cost, value, project success, and system uptime (and maybe performance).

Cost is easy.

The project success rate is easy.

System uptime and performance are semi-easy.

Value is the kicker, since IT is an enabler of value rather than a driver.

One approach: Make sure all projects define their expected business value - this is the business sponsor's responsibility, not IT's responsibility. If the only accepted value measure is money, insist that Finance provide an accepted means for translating various forms of intangible business benefits into financial measures. If your company makes use of a Balanced Scorecard, the impact of each project on the Balanced Scorecard measures should do."

(From: Infoworld.com, Advice Line by Bob Lewis, (c) IDG Network)