Just a few years ago, everyone used the phrase "killer app." The reference, of course, was to new technologies that would revolutionize some process or activity; some technology solution that would excite venture capitalists, Wall Street analysts, vendors, and customers. Most of the killer apps back then were Internet-focused. But since 2000, not too many people use the phrase.

Although mobile technology is still young and has limitations, it continues to create novel applications and new business models, "mobilizing" and refining business processes. Mobile computing is attracting a lot of interest as stakeholders come to realize its value, and it is empowering us in myriad ways. Quietly, the mobile revolution has begun!

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become one of the top priorities of IT organizations and application providers. By applying SOA, IT organizations intend to reuse technology, processes, and people. However, as SOA becomes prevailing software engineering practice, not enough has been done to adopt SOA concepts into the infrastructure domain.

Agile software development and agile project management (APM) practices have started to take root in several US companies, and many of these same companies have begun outsourcing software development to offshore companies. Because the agile process requires a very high level of communication and interaction among team members, it calls for all trained team members to be colocated.

Pitney Bowes is acquiring data quality tools vendor FirstLogic for approximately US $50.3 million. Pitney Bowes plans to integrate FirstLogic's specialized data cleansing and enhancement technology with its own data quality, enterprise mail, and document management systems, thus further solidifying its position as a major player in the market for such products and services.

Determining the range of actions that an organization needs to take to reduce security risk to an adequate or acceptable level depends on what an organization needs to protect and what it needs to prevent. Consider the following questions from an enterprise perspective:

Event-driven architecture (EDA) has been at the center of an architectural controversy lately. The basic question is: Is EDA the same as service-oriented architecture (SOA), part of an SOA, or different than SOA? Let's examine what EDA is and put the debate into an architectural context to determine how EDA and SOA relate.