February 8th, 2010 | 
Author: Several years ago, I sat next to then-Oracle UK managing director Ian Smith at an industry event. At the time, the software giant was pursuing an aggressive and increasingly contentious purchase of rival PeopleSoft, and for a while looked like losing.
Discussing this with Smith, he turned to me at the end of the conversation and said: “I’ll tell you this: what Larry wants, Larry gets.”
Sure enough, Oracle’s famously confident chief executive Larry Ellison got what he wanted. Since then, he has got a lot of what he wanted as the supplier went on an unprecedented spending spree that took in Siebel, BEA Systems, niche software firms too numerous to mention, and most recently, Sun Microsystems. In the process, Ellison has revolutionised the company he founded, from a database and business software specialist to one of the true giants of the IT sector.
Why? Because Ellison wants to take on the biggest of them all – IBM.
To reinforce the point that Smith made, just look to the waters of the Mediterranean off Valencia this week. In 2000, Ellison, a keen yacht racer, set his sights on winning the America’s Cup, sailing’s most prestigious prize. After several unsuccessful attempts – and a long and costly series of legal cases – Ellison’s BMW Oracle Racing team is facing off against holder Alinghi in one of the most technically ambitious, complex, and expensive racing yachts ever built, a 90-foot trimaran featuring a 220-foot wingsail – the largest ever fitted to a sailing boat.
What Larry wants, Larry gets.
So once he gets back to his Redwood Shores HQ in California, what will Larry want next for Oracle? If IBM is the target, there is an obvious gap in his current strategy. So much of IBM’s success today is founded on its Global Services operation – the IT services, outsourcing and consultancy group that leads so much of Big Blue’s sales efforts and high-level customer relationships.
Surely, if there is one thing Larry wants – and needs – it’s an Oracle Global Services. With Sun in place as the hardware arm to take on IBM’s server business, an IT services firm is surely the next target for Ellison’s acquisitive wallet. If he could have anyone, I’ll bet he would take Accenture – with EDS now in the hands of HP, Accenture stands out as the only truly global outsourcer that remains independent.
There may be other, less ambitious, targets – CSC, Capgemini, the big Indian firms – that cannot be ruled out, but none would give Ellison the immediate global reach and opportunity of Accenture. With a market capitalisation of $25bn, it would be one of the largest takeovers in IT history, and perhaps even for Ellison it remains an acquisition too far – although Oracle itself is currently worth some $118bn.
But as Ellison pursues the sailing trophy that has so far eluded him, you cannot question his ambition. Rule nothing out – what Larry wants, Larry gets.
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Once upon a time, URLs (Uniform Resource Locators, which most of us know as Web addresses or links) were short and simple. Often, they looked something like http://www.geeks.com. If you had a personal Web page, your URL might look something like http://www.facebook.com/ComputerGeeks
Times change, and URLs have expanded. A lot. Just do a search at the Web site of a large corporation or your favorite online retailer. What often comes back is a long and convoluted URL. And that becomes a problem if you’re into microblogging. Services like Twitter limit you to 140 characters. Some long URLs exceed that limit by quite a bit.
So, how can you tame those impossibly long URLs? With a Web-based service called a URL shortener.
If you want to boost the signal of your wireless linksys router all you need is configure the router. You can type on the browser 192.168.1.1 which is the default IP address assigned on the router. After logging in you can go to wireless then click advance settings. Most configuration in this area is based on default configuration, change the following value.
- Beacon Interval – 50
- Fragmentation Threshold – 2304
- RTS Threshold – 2304
After setting the values you can save the configuration and turn off the router for several seconds. Turn it on again to use the canges made on your router.
Did find the post very useful? Maybe you want to buy me a glass of beer!
Source: paparts
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Source: admin
The iPod Touch is more than just an MP3/MP4 player. And it’s far more than just a crippled iPhone. It’s a portable entertainment center, and a powerful tool for the mobile worker.
The key to the latter, though, is finding the right apps. Many of the applications for the iPod Touch that are available through Apple’s AppStore are fun. There are some that are … well, they’re interesting. Others are downright useless.
The apps that this TechTip covers are perfect for the geek on the go. They range in price from free to under five dollars. Best of all, they can keep you productive and connected.
Ask any IT manager that has dealt with a supplier sales representative if that rep is always utterly honest and scrupulous when describing their products or services, and most would smile knowingly and shake their heads.
IT suppliers oversell. They are not alone or unusual in that – most of us have experienced over-selling of some form as individual consumers, let alone in our working life.
Imagine a salesman faced with the final negotiations for a multimillion-pound deal, sitting across the desk from the IT director with a pen hovering above the contract and an expectant sales manager waiting back at the office. If he does not come back with a signature, he’s in trouble. You’re only as good as your last deal. The pressure to get the business is huge.
I should know – I was once an IT salesman. I have sat at that desk, and it wasn’t a lot of fun (and that’s one of the reasons I’m not a salesman any more).
If the IT director looks up and says, “Of course, this system will work won’t it?”, sales staff are trained not to commit, not to say anything that could be deemed a contractual commitment. But for some, under that pressure, knowing that a simple “yes” will get the deal, they do what they feel they have to do, and then forget they said it. I worked with plenty of sales executives who would not have given it a second thought, and would be too busy calculating their commission to worry. Sorry, but it’s true.
So perhaps the biggest surprise in the precedent-setting BSkyB vs EDS court ruling this week, is that this is the first time a supplier has been held to account for misrepresentation. It was only a matter of time before a big enough customer, with a big enough wallet and a big enough sense of grievance, went all the way through the legal process. The judge effectively ruled that an EDS employee oversold what the company could deliver. HP, now the owner of EDS, denies this and will no doubt appeal.
But every IT supplier, and every IT manager, could be affected by this important ruling.
Suppliers will be less willing to accept a contract without a requirements specification nailed down to the last detail. IT projects are not like buildings, it’s not as simple as creating a blueprint and a bill of materials. But faced with unlimited liability, that degree of risk means suppliers may be forced to treat IT contracts as if they were.
On the other hand, the next time an IT decision-maker is faced with an underperforming supplier or problem project, if they can find any suggestion of misrepresentation, the precedent has been set for over-ruling contractual limits on supplier liability.
Watch how that focuses the minds of your sales rep the next time you are waving your pen over that contract.
Accountability – or the lack of it – has been a hot topic in government IT ¬circles for some time. One of the recurring causes of project failure in Whitehall is the lack of consistency in leadership, both from within the civil service and politically, where senior individuals move on (or are moved on) into new jobs elsewhere.
A few years ago a new role was created to focus on accountability – that of senior responsible owner (SRO) – but all that has happened in many cases is the SRO changes, even if the title remains.
It is all too rare that the head of a large Whitehall IT project at its inception is still in place at its conclusion.
So it is refreshing to see a government IT leader putting personal accountability at the top of his priorities. “If I get it wrong they can fire me,” said Serious Fraud Office CIO Josh Ellis.
In private sector IT accountability is, more often than not, accepted and expected. An IT project manager’s career succeeds or fails on his or her ability to deliver and bring the project in on time and budget. IT suppliers have lost contracts where they have been unable to ensure consistency in their project leadership and key team members.
It is true that Whitehall is a unique environment, one where many senior staff view regular job moves as the way to advance their career prospects, and are often encouraged to do so. But when the political policy dictates large-scale, centralised projects such as the NHS National Programme for IT, that situation sits entirely at odds with the need for accountable, consistent management. The NHS programme has suffered more than most for all-too frequent changes in SRO.
Ultimately, even with the best policies in place, accountability is a personal thing, as Ellis demonstrates. Project leaders need to be incentivised and rewarded for longevity and success – or the structure of those projects needs to be reviewed.
Given the Geek that we’re sure you are, you’re probably on your third or fourth desktop computer already. If this is you, then this Tech Tip is for you!
Before recycling that old machine why not make good use of its parts – specifically the drives. This week we’ll be looking at some cool things that you can do with those old drives.
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Source: admin
Once upon a time, the IT integration involved in merging two major banks would have given Computer Weekly something to write about for years.
The integration of Lloyds Bank and TSB was a bit of an epic, as was Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest. There were once even rumours that a big banking acquisition had to be scrapped because due diligence showed the technology integration overshadowed the wider corporate gain.
So the fact that customers of Bradford & Bingley and Abbey National can now go into any branch of the newly-renamed Santander and be treated the same using the same systems demonstrates how far the thinking and the technology of integration has come in the last 10 years.
For Santander, the core principle is one that increasing numbers of multinationals take for their global IT strategy – ruthless standardisation.
The bank’s Partenon platform has been the key to the rapid integration of the companies it snapped up during the 2008 banking crisis – Alliance & Leicester goes live later this year.
HSBC replaced 55 separate banking systems and 41 internet banking systems with a single platform, bringing enormous financial and operational benefits. For other global organisations it might be standardising on SAP or Oracle.
The thinking that underpins all these initiatives is simplification. Nearly every organisation has a legacy of complexity in its IT infrastructure, systems built up and bolted on as new technologies have emerged. The situation is a result of the “next big thing” attitude of the IT industry, where sales were driven by new tech trends more than by customer need. Those days are increasingly behind us.
If the recession has taught us anything it is the need to be able to respond rapidly to change – whether good or bad. Complexity is the enemy of change, and those organisations hampered by inflexible IT have suffered most.
The lessons from Santander should resonate with every IT manager – simplicity and standardisation must be the basis of every IT strategy.