Stories by John Edwards

The cloud offers a wide range of tangible business benefits, but don't let these common blunders cast a shadow on your company's success.

Creating and sustaining a successful agile program requires a strong commitment and careful planning. Yet ruining a functional agile initiative is remarkably easy.

Knowledge and planning transforms data analytics from a "dark science" into a mainstream business tool.

Admitting project failure is never easy, but sometimes the kill decision turns out to be the best decision. Here's how to know when to scrap and when to save a failing project.

Admitting project failure is never easy, but sometimes the kill decision turns out to be the best decision. Here's how to know when to scrap and when to save a failing project.

Powerful new tools replace crystal ball predictions with deep and actionable insights.

When John Campbell talks about Purdue University's soon-to-be implemented modular data center, he can hardly hide his enthusiasm.

Glenn Phillips, president of Pelham, Ala.-based Forté, says that the dedicated Windows workstations his company sells to hospital emergency room administrators must not only be secure, but absolutely tamperproof as well. After all, lives depend on the machines' flawless operation.

In an IT world full of elusive goals, there's probably no target as slippery and generally elusive as server uptime.

Joe Latrell, IT manager and lead programmer for GetMyHomesValue.com, a real estate data services company in Lancaster, Pa., knows that it's all too easy for even a knowledgeable and experienced IT veteran to make mistakes while managing a complex server-consolidation project. "You have to think about everything," he says. "It can be a minefield."

Jeff Haynie reached a crossroads last summer. Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator, a firm that develops open source cross-platform application development software, made a decision filled with implications for his company's future. That decision: to toss away his upcoming product's Gnu General Public License (GPL), the best-known and most popular free software license, in favor of what he viewed as a more business-friendly alternative. "We initially started the product with a GPLv3 license and we decided last summer to move the license to Apache," Haynie says.

September 2008 will certainly go down as one of the blackest months in Wall Street history. Venerable financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG abruptly vanished or were radically overhauled. Investors lost loads of money -- in some cases, fortunes -- and ordinary taxpayers are now finding themselves funding an industry bailout that could cost a staggering US$700 billion, perhaps even more.

If you're in the hotel business, customer satisfaction isn't just a key metric, it's one that can make or break the company. But until recently, addressing sources of customer dissatisfaction was taking too long for Gaylord Hotels. US-based Gaylord, which operates 4 resort hotels in the Nashville; Dallas; Orlando, Florida; and Washington areas, needed a quick, clear view of how customers and meeting planners viewed its properties and services, as well as alerts to budding problems.

Are your employees and customers looking for answers? Enterprise search vendors promise to help you help them.

Buying one security product containing an arsenal of capabilities is convenient, cheap and potentially dangerous.