i Roadmaps: Here Be Dragons
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

When I was a kid, I was crazy about maps. In my family, even when I was quite young, when someone was lost, they tossed me the map to figure out where on earth we were. My Dad and Mom trusted me with the maps more than themselves, which I didn't think of as peculiar until later in life. (I think visually. They don't. My Dad thinks with his hands and can make or fix anything, and my Mom thinks with her mouth, and can cut right to the heart of the matter.) READ MORE >

IBM Closes 2008 on a High, i Sales Unclear
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Wall Street got a chance to catch its breath a little last Tuesday after the market closed when IBM announced its financial results for the fourth quarter, a quarter that was impacted by the economic crisis last summer and fall but one in which Big Blue nonetheless was able to pull out of the fire profit-wise by cutting costs. More importantly, perhaps, IBM's top brass reaffirmed that they were on track, despite the state of the global economy, to meet aggressive profit targets. READ MORE >

Data Warehouses: Know One When You See One?
by Dan Burger

People may have problems defining a data warehouse. They may have problems designing and building a data warehouse, too. But that hasn't slowed down the desire to get a better grasp on data and use it more effectively to drive the business and preserve revenues. 'What many people describe as a data warehouse is actually a data mart or something else,' says Bill O'Connell, chief technology officer of data warehousing within IBM's Information Management division. READ MORE >

The X Factor: Head in the Clouds
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For a while now, people have been talking about utility-style computing, and as was the case a decade ago with application service providing, or ASPs, we are now being barraged with vendors coming out of the woodwork peddling cloud computing or somehow tying what they do to the idea of cloud computing. But the interesting development this time around is that cloud computing is a lot more affordable than ASP was, thanks to cheap iron, open source software, and inexpensive broadband Internet. READ MORE >