Skip to main content

The Big Blue

Yes, you have guessed it right - the subject of this post is not "The Big Blue" (Le Grand Bleu) a 1988 English-language film by French director Luc Besson (though it would be an interesting topic in and by itself), it is the corporation - International Business Machines (better known as simply IBM). Established in 1896 under the name of Tabulating Machine Company it adopted its current name in 1924 under the leadership of Thomas J. Watson.

In my opinion, IBM holds a special place in the history of computing as over the years the company has made tremendous contributions to the science and the industry through its continued research and innovation. Metaphorically speaking, it is one of computing founding fathers. So, it should not come as a surprise that IBM is also one of the Cloud Computing pioneers. The company’s research into large scale computing, its long history and a wealth of experience with building and running complex systems and large datacenters, coupled with an impressive portfolio of hardware and software products and a world-wide professional services organization, provides a perfect foundation for the Cloud Computing platform of the future. And for IBM this is a natural progression of things, to quote one of the IBM sites dedicated to cloud computing – “workstations used to be tied to a mainframe, now they're conversing with a cloud.”

That said, it often seems that IBM does not get enough exposure and recognition. While Google Apps and Microsoft’s BPOS/Office 365 get a lot of press, similar offering from IBM – LotusLive Collaboration Suite goes almost unnoticed. Similarly, both Google’s and Microsoft’s strides towards FISMA certified cloud services were well publicized and covered by many industry periodicals. Meanwhile, IBM has readied its own cloud offerings for Federal and Municipal Governments, see the following article.

So, it may not be hip and trendy, but the amazing longevity IBM has demonstrated in this fast paced and even faster changing industry demands attention to what it has to offer. I suggest you take a closer look and decide for yourself what is the value - http://www.ibm.com/ibm/cloud/. Also, check out the the following quick video:


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Skype for Business and VTC Interoperability

Skype for Business (SfB) has a very, very strong potential, I have written about it in my previous post . I can't think of any other platform that shows as much promise in terms of bridging personal and business communications as well as unifying different modes and mediums. And all of this may have started with a strategic acquisition of Skype by Microsoft in 2011. That said, the road ahead is not without challenges. For example, interoperability with other platforms. Making SfB work with existing Video TeleConferencing (VTC) systems, many of which represent significant capital investments in organizations' infrastructure, could be of a particular importance. After reading statements like Skype for Business is based on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standards and supports H.264 (MPEG-4 video coding standard) one can come to a quick conclusion that integration and/or interoperability with other VTC solutions is easy or nearly automatic. Unfortunately, the industry is not

WordPress displays weird characters

Sometimes after a database conversion (e.g. from MySQL to MariaDB) or due to encoding issues a situation might arise when WordPress is showing weird characters. A quick way of remedying the situation would involve examining the pages to discover a pattern (what characters are being substituted, in the example below the apostrophe was replaced by  ’ ) then running an queries against the database to reverse the effect. Here's a quick example (common tables that store content): UPDATE  wp_posts  SET  post_content =  REPLACE (post_content,  'Â' ,  '' )      UPDATE  wp_posts  SET  post_content =  REPLACE (post_content,  '’' ,  "'" )      UPDATE  wp_postmeta  SET  meta_value =  REPLACE (meta_value,  'Â' ,  '' )      UPDATE  wp_postmeta  SET  meta_value =  REPLACE (meta_value,  '’' ,  "'" )      Please, keep in mind that to permanently resolve the issue you would need to get to the root of the p

Mail-enabled security groups in Office 365

Another update (11/19/2013):  further evolution of Office 365 services makes creation of distribution and security groups even easier, plus there's now an option of creating a dynamic distribution group (click here for more information):    Update (08/06/2012): a clear sign of Office 365 evolving along the same lines as other agile cloud services - small incremental features and minor new functionality are being delivered almost continuously and, unlike important major service updates,  without much fanfare. For example, there's no need to resort to using PowerShell to setup mail-enabled security groups anymore, it can now be done at creation using management portal:       Those managing Office 365 ( O365 ) tenant via the Microsoft Online Services Portal  ( MOS Portal ) interface would notice that there are two distinct group entities: Security Groups: can be created via MOS Portal (main portal page>Management>Security Groups) and used for assigning