So the best that HP can say about OpenVMS, as it passes its 30th anniversary as a front line operating environment, is that the software still doesn

A few weeks ago came the news that VMware, already well established as the poster child of enterprise server virtualisation, was extending its reach down into the small and medium-sized business world. There is a sub-text to this announcement, however, that opens up the world of Software as a Service (SaaS), not only to the small business user but also to their enterprise equivalent

A couple of recent stories about Google have caught my eye, if only because they each carry an object lesson for users, and vendors, about the way the world is changing from the application of technology and to the delivery of services. What is more, together they show that companies like Google understand the trends and changes better than most of the vendors.

For example, Apache would be high on many lists of software choices for running a Web Server, yet its market share has started to drop away despite solid growth

One of the fascinating things about rules is just what you can do with them once there is a convenient way of making them work automatically. That means rules engines and, while it may be easy to assume that automated rules processing and management is of necessity still quite simple, there is a subtlety growing in that business which is showing all the signs of moving beyond the ability to run just a process, and onto the ability to genuinely manage complex issues.

Take, as an example, some recently undertaken work by rules engine vendor, inRule, on behalf of an outsourcing and remote hosting service provider. It is easy to imagine where a rules engine would fit into that environment. It would be monitoring such areas as the capacity and predicted loading on available resources, for example, so that the system kept running as well as possible. It would be comparing contracted service levels against current and predicted levels given the overall upstream workload and capacity available.

The objective here would be, not unreasonably, the protection of the business of the outsource/hosting company