Data integration vendor Informatica Corporation announced it is buying complex event processing (CEP) software vendor Agent Logic. Financial terms of the deal were not revealed. Still, this development is significant because it will combine the capabilities of Informatica's data integration tools with Agent Logic's rules-based CEP platform.

Different people understand cloud computing in different ways. Some see it as a communications enabler. Some see it as the source of open source and proprietary applications. Some see it as a path to technology independence. Others see it as extreme outsourcing. So what is it? My working definition comes from our colleagues at Wikipedia, who tell us that cloud computing:

I'm not sure that I agree with the notion that innovation (creativity) is going to collapse in these hard times just because of a lack of money (see "Code Blue for IT Innovation," Cutter Business Technology Trends Council Opinion, Vol. 9, No. 12).

A couple of recent client engagements, with very large companies, reminded me about the fixation on process in many companies. Having used agile, iterative methods for so many years, I lost track of how pervasive process orientation can be in some organizations.

There was a time in the early 1990s when a good laptop computer cost upwards of US $4,000. This was for a computer with a 10-inch screen, four or eight MB of memory, and a 100-MB disk. Communications for this computer were limited to a slow-speed, dial-up line.

Cutter is paying attention to IT governance in 2009. The September Cutter Benchmark Review (CBR) reports the results of the recent Cutter IT Governance Survey. The December Cutter IT Journal, which we're editing, is about IT governance. Recent CIO surveys done by others place IT governance in the top echelon of concerns.

As I pointed out in last week's Advisor (see "Complex Event Processing," 26 August 2009), complex event processing (CEP) remains an emerging technology that holds the promise of enabling companies to increase operational efficiency by providing a means to identify and interpret the effect of seemingly unrelated events

It cannot be said any clearer: we have significantly underestimated the impact that the Web is having -- and will continue to have -- on our personal and professional lives.

I've been talking with friends and colleagues over the last few days about which current IT technologies and concepts will still be in vogue two years from now. Of course, "Web 2.0" immediately came up.

The recent announcement by BI vendor MicroStrategy, Inc., that its BI toolset (MicroStrategy 9) has been certified to run on the VMware virtualization platform has me thinking more about the possible benefits and issues of operating BI systems in virtualization environments.

In this Advisor, we'll consider some tactics for employing service-oriented architecture (SOA) techniques to improve your agile projects -- in other words, at service-orienting agile.

One of the major strengths of cloud computing is the freedom it gives companies to think strategically -- not tactically -- about how they want to leverage technology.

The intensely fractious healthcare debate should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone whose risks ultimately touch the personal lives of others. It has been a dramatic American experience as an entire nation has staked out positions either for or against the increased government role in individual healthcare and health insurance.

Service-oriented viewpoints are a way of gaining early measurable business value through reuse of existing services, including external cloud services as well as internal legacy services. Think of each viewpoint as a different pair of spectacles through which the analyst views the process.

Complex event processing (CEP) generated a lot of hype in 2007 and 2008. By 2009, however, the hype has died down. With the recent "Community Technology Preview" release of Microsoft SQL Server StreamInsight, I expect the hype meter to begin revving up once again.

While post-recovery conditions are not likely to immediately return to pre-crash states, some cyclical trends will remain in place and help us forecast the medium term. Other forces outside IT may have the greatest impact on IT's future.

Businesses have been sourcing, and will continue to source, services from third parties located in distant countries to meet their organizational objectives of reduced cost, improved efficiencies, and higher quality of services. Yet the interconnectedness of enterprises increases operational complexity and adds to the burden on each entity to comply with strict privacy legislation and data-security requirements.

The recent announcement by BI vendor MicroStrategy, Inc., that its BI toolset (MicroStrategy 9) has been certified to run on the VMware virtualization platform has me thinking more about the possible benefits and issues of operating BI systems in virtualization environments.

Our industry benefited from a surge of IT capital spending in the years leading up to 2000 and has had little since then. That means the average company may now be running on an IT capital base that has been depreciated away to nothing or near nothing.

To make something new (a thing, a service, or an idea), you might adopt a goal: to make something new. We can call that an abstract goal: it’s perfectly particular, but allows for an infinite number of realizations. You can’t describe that goal in any detail, as you would an algorithm or a piece of music. The only way to describe it usefully is to repeat it.

Recently, looking at scaling issues for a couple of multinational organizations, the issue of feature teams (customer-oriented) versus component teams (technically oriented) arose again. In an earlier Advisor (see "Feature vs.

"Information wants to be free, but organizations want to charge for it."

-- Cutter Fellow Tom DeMarco

Even today, capacity planning in IT proves difficult. Data storage requirements continue to grow dramatically. CPU demand keeps moving along briskly. Network consumption grows, too.

I suppose I ought to know better, and I do, but the marketing hype still never ceases to impress me. The latest victim: "the cloud." It is reported by our friends in the hype-cycle department that cloud computing is at the pinnacle of being overblown.

Unless you have been buried under a rock for the past eight years, you have probably noticed that practically all of the revolutionary IT products and hot services that get the big buzz are being developed directly for the consumer sector. Think about all of the great new products -- wireless LAN, instant messaging, Web 2.0, social networking, MP3 players, PDA technology, flash drives, and cloud computing (yes even cloud computing, which is mostly a means for Google and Amazon to recoup some of their excess capacity investments).