John Taschek

Although many acknowledge the capabilities of Sun Microsystems Inc.s UltraSPARC in high-end Solaris-based systems, they have written off the processor as antiquated and expensive. Suns engineers, however, have come up with an UltraSPARC road map that could shake the semiconductor world. By 2005—roughly 24 months from now—Sun will announce an UltraSPARC design, targeted at blade […]

Microsoft became a virtual company with its recent acquisition of Connectix. Its only a matter of time before Microsoft positions Windows as the core operating system capable of virtualizing and managing Linux server distributions. The thought is not crazy. IBM pseudo-virtualized Windows 3.0 with OS/2 in 1990. With that failure, the virtual world settled down. […]

Microsoft Corp.s Microsoft CRM raises the bar for customer relationship management in the small and midsize markets. Unfortunately, it was a low bar to begin with. It might not matter, though. To the IT community, Microsoft CRM is perhaps the most important business solution released to date. Microsoft has blurred the lines between technologist and […]

For the first time, most exhibitors and demonstrators at Demo—the one conference that continues to focus on practical innovation—focused on tactical solutions aimed at the enterprise. Groxis Inc., Opencola Ltd. and Meaningful Machines LLC proved once again that we have no idea where our data is. They also proved that while the technical answer to […]

One of the most fascinating lectures Ive attended lately was “How Databases Changed the World,” put on by the Computer History Museum. The event last week featured a panel discussion by the biggies in the database business, including Chris Date, Michael Stonebraker (formerly of Illustra and Informix, among others), Ken Jacobs (Oracle), Bob Epstein (formerly […]

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.—Another batch of companies went through the grinder at Demo—the one conference that continues to focus on practical innovation—and surprise, there are some likely survivors. For the first time, the majority of exhibitors and demonstrators at the conference focused on tactical solutions aimed at the enterprise. Most of the venture capitalists surely were confused. […]

Its easy to knock what you dont understand. Suns N1—the vendors bet-the-company technology for autonomic, on-demand, network computing—falls into the camp of little-understood technologies. So Suns big N1 kickoff was brilliant. Why? Because it hid the technology under the protective blanket of a dozen or so product announcements. Those announcements ranged from Wintel server consolidation […]

Integration is key to CRM success, which is why customer relationship management hasnt been widely successful. Microsoft Corp. overcomes some of those integration hurdles with its Microsoft CRM, which eWeek Labs has been testing for the past couple of weeks. (Our comprehensive review of Microsoft CRM will appear in next weeks issue.) Microsoft CRM leverages […]

Since the advent of e-commerce, standards bodies have been seeking a lingua franca for business communication. Unfortunately, early efforts such as EDI had a high barrier to entry in terms of cost and complexity. However, a new specification—Universal Business Language—may deliver on the common-language promise. More recently, XML and the public Internet were thought to […]

Its been a tough year for Microsoft, and its only February. First, the company was attacked simply for taking .Net out of its server naming strategy. That led The New York Times to question whether Microsofts strategy was effective. Then the SQL Slammer worm, which affected Microsoft SQL Server implementations across the planet, nearly crippled […]