IDC's xSP Taxonomy

IDC's biweekly xSP newsletter has some content worth bookmarking today — there's a very useful diagram showing all the layers of the xSP stack, from network service providers at the foundation, all the way up to professional services (IDC calls them Process Execution Providers) at the top. There are some very useful concepts here, which map precisely to diagrams I've done myself of the service provider matrix. I may align some of my own terms with theirs, since IDC of course holds more sway when it comes to making acronyms stick than I do.
posted by Phil Wainewright 11:17 AM (GMT) | comments | link

Sun adds buzzwords to its app server

Interesting to note these welcome buzzwords appearing in the latest release of iPlanet Application Server from Sun:

• "... enable ... the construction of composite-based Web services ..."


• "... offering a 'loosely coupled asynchronous capability' ..."

posted by Phil Wainewright 12:26 AM (GMT) | comments | link

Business ethics are back

Integrity and business morality do matter after all. That's the welcome conclusion to be drawn from a speech by the chairman of the SEC, commenting on the Enron scandal. A lot of people forgot that in the mad dash to amass wealth in the growth climate of the late 1990s. I guess public morality is just as cyclical as the economy; but when we leave it behind, we are all the poorer in the long run.
posted by Phil Wainewright 11:42 PM (GMT) | comments | link

Wrongheaded security logic from Microsoft

Microsoft has decided that its .Net Framework should block external services as a default, reports The Register. It will be up to individual customers to make exceptions for certain trusted sources, or to remove the block entirely if they want to. The idea is to reassure corporates that .Net is safe, but in fact the logic is completely wrongheaded. Once you start letting the Internet into your organisation (and that's an economic necessity in today's world), the only way to guarantee security is by having properly secure operating systems and applications. Switching off access to untrusted sources does not make an insecure system any more secure. The only thing it achieves is to put obstacles in the way of effectively taking advantage of new resources as they become available on the network.
posted by Phil Wainewright 11:31 AM (GMT) | comments | link