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About 10 years ago, I was young and naïve, and was sold by marketing hype on a newer better design for an electric guitar from a company called Parker. The slick glossies that I came across had me salivating at the thought of a new and better way to play my music. Could these things actually make me a better musician?

openSLP gets new updates for OES2 and SLES10 to enable caching of SLP service entries.

Operate, Control & Deliver Services through Technology is the Job of IT Operations

Cloud and Virtualization brings Agility - At What Hidden Cost and What Value?

When the Novell Business Service Management product team was on the cusp of releasing an integration to Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing service (EC2) this month the very first thing that came to my mind as a one time (century's ago in the dark ages of mainframes, assembler, CICS and COBOL) application developer was, "if dialing up a VM is free in the cloud, what is to stop me from calling it continually, on a whim and just leave it running?". If I don't see the cost, how would you expect the costs to be managed conscienciously and with frugality? Why would that occur to me? Coming from the dark ages, I worked for a large outsourcer where size of the code, how fast it ran, how many requests for the same data was scrutinized (read once, use often), etc.

Reminds me of having a mobile phone, sent to Europe to travel and told, just use the phone. Then I found the roaming charges as I investigated my own usage one month in an attempt to estimate what I might require on a personal plan. WOW! The hidden roaming cost would have changed my behavior had I known ahead of time.

Read on for quick run down of these hidden costs brought on by new technology...........

Today, Novell announced immediate availability of GroupWise 8.0.2. The latest update to the GroupWise 8 product line that not only adds stability, reliability and quality, but also adds specific features and enhancements!

Read all about it!

A customer reached out to me with some questions on our Business Data Integrator Adapter. This is an adapter (Integration module) that is designed to pull data from a database and bring it into BSM and/or CMDB. He was using the IDE (think of a drag and drop designer to define what the database integration should do) and had a question regarding...

Why is Intelligent Workload Management important to IaaS providers? IaaS providers should pay attention to what's happening in the IWM market.

After the fact "reporting" is merely just reporting the score of the game!

Bold statement, I know. Let me explain. When asked about where BSM or IT to business alignment projects begin, I can generally categorize in 3 buckets:

• Fixing "Boo Boo's" - Availability & Performance - ROI tangible, tied to revenue impacted by outages
• Process Efficiency - Automation, Change, Control - ROI is tougher and more "cost management"
• Service Alignment - Service to Business Impact - ROI tangible, tied to manual cost reduction

Service alignment driven projects tend to the final stage of maturity, however, this does not need to be the case as defining these service objectives defines the objectives and behavior of the previous 2 project categories and has the potential to drive bigger bang for the buck by driving top line revenue versus bottom line costs.

Read on to find out how to make your SLAs matter.............

Novell® Conferencing simplifies Web conferencing with easy-to-host and join virtual meetings that don’t require any downloads or software installation. To help you make Web conferencing even easier, the following gives you some quick insights and tips to help you get the most out of your Novell Conferencing experience.

Hype and Bubble Burst for the CMDB Finally - Fall of the Dreaded 4 Letter Word!

They fall as fast as they rise. What is the "value" of static data from the past in a database? Outside of tracking how many, cost and depreciation value, I cannot think of a single thing. Although as I watch the Nats play the Mets, baseball is all about metrics and stats from the past without relative value for the novice watcher. Number of homeruns in relationship to how many others have hit or the most ever hit brings a whole new perspective. It's the relationship and relativivity of the metric that brings "value" by creating "information".

The topic of CMDB can bring holy war, lengthy debate, but tonight I am going to be short and sweet with luck and slightly controversial.

Read on..........