Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

August 19, 2012

Survey: CIOs Bullish on Cloud Benefits, But Worry About SaaS Data Silos
CIOs continue to grow more and more bullish about cloud solutions, with a whopping 92% saying that cloud provides business benefits, according to a recent survey. Nonetheless, IT execs remain concerned over how to avoid SaaS-based data silos. The survey was conducted by Dimensional Research and commissioned by Host Analytics.

KPMG: Why is the SaaS cloud market expanding rapidly?
It’s a reasonable enough assumption – companies moving to the cloud often do so in the hope of reducing cost, after all – and it appears SaaS is the best model with which to achieve that aim, although there are still some worries for CIOs to consider.

A Study in Leader Humility
Colin’s story reminds me of the vital role humility can play in leading a business organization. It also tells me that if there is one Colin, there have to be many more like him, quietly working away, not for the glory, but for the pleasure of being part of something great, something much bigger and more important than themselves.

Oracle Makes More Moves To Kill Open Source MySQL
It’s pretty clear that Oracle is trying to make it as difficult as possible to use MySQL. The result is a wave of unsettlement in the developer community about what Oracle considers open and what it sees as closed. The move is causing problems for developers in all manner of ways as expressed here and here.

It Takes Guts To Start A Company--So How Do You Get 'Em?
The willingness to take risks is born of a combination of elements. Your personality, your experiences, your “training” to deal with risk, and your support network all factor into your readiness to accept and embrace the risks that entrepreneurship requires.

Data Loss Prevention Is Better -- And Cheaper -- Than The Cure
Do yourself a massive favor and go check the state of your backups. Make sure that your precious digital data is safe. Do it before you’re faced with a massive recovery bill.

Quest Software unveils Foglight for Windows Azure applications Available immediately as a beta, the newest addition to the Foglight APM portfolio enables IT administrators to monitor performance and understand what end users are experiencing with Windows Azure-based applications.

Google Cloud Messaging for Android (GCM) Unveiled, to Replace C2DM Framework
GCM offers the ability to introduce a broker in between an application server and Android devices, guaranteeing cloud-type scalable communication between the two parties. GCM defines the contract so both a server and Android applications register for the GCM service and Google GCM servers maintain communication between them. The GCM servers handle all aspects of queuing messages and delivery to the target applications running on Android devices.

IG Group Open-Sources RESTdoclet
RESTdoclet is available for download as Open Source on GitHub, or in binary form from Sonatype, both under the terms of the Apache 2 license. Be sure to check out the project wiki for usage instructions, and do feel free to email IG Group at (open.source@iggroup.com) if you have any questions or feedback.

Quotes for the day:

"Management is a position that is granted; leadership is a status that is earned." ~K. Scott Derrick

"Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them." ~Robert Jarvik

August 18, 2012

Implementing COBIT 5—An IT practitioner’s view eight months later
Vector took a chance last year and decided from the get-go to adopt COBIT 5 whilst it was still in exposure draft. ... So what have been the biggest challenges for us so far? Three come to mind...

Deep Data and the Semantics of Local
Surely local search can do better. Businesses want to provide rich information about their products and services, and consumers want and need that information in order to turn local search from a frustrating experience into a useful and productive one.

Doing business in India difficult: Dell
A combination of power blackouts, uncertain tax rules and contracts that are not honoured make India a difficult place to do business, a senior Dell Inc executive said on Friday in unusually blunt comments by a foreign investor.

Rackspace Launches OpenStack-based Private Cloud Software
Rackspace, a hosting and cloud computing provider, yesterday announced the release of Rackspace Private Cloud Software, powered by OpenStack - making it simple and easy for companies to install, test and run a multi-node OpenStack based private cloud environment.

Heroic Leaders and Passive Followers
As leaders, if we take too much control and do not encourage others to take responsibility, we set ourselves and others up for failure. Roger Martin calls it the responsibility virus and it always begins with the germ of fear.

Microsoft’s Free Security Tools - Attack Surface Analyzer
Attack Surface Analyzer can help software developers and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) understand the changes in Windows systems’ attack surface resulting from the installation of the applications they develop.

The Big Data Definitions Merriam-Webster Forgot
The lexicographers had clearly missed several opportunities to capture the big data zeitgeist. As a certified word nerd, it is my sworn duty to aid them. Herewith is an abridged list of new words and their official definitions, supplemented by my additional definitions in italics.

Malware wars heat up: Shamoon steals, wipes and leaves PCs unbootable
There is speculation that it spreads via an executable hidden in an email attachment that if opened on a Windows computer, "It can be difficult getting anything working again," warned Symantec researcher Liam O Murchu. “If your computer gets hit and you can't reboot, you have a real problem,” Techworld reported.

Researcher finds serious SMS spoofing flaw on iOS
A security research who goes by the handle "pod2g" has found a serious security vulnerability in the way iOS devices handle SMS messages, warning that this could be exploited by online criminals. The flaw, which the researcher describes as "severe," exists since the beginning of the implementation of SMS in the iPhone, and is still there in iOS 6 beta 4.

Quotes for the day:

"You got to be careful if you don't know where you are going, because you might not get there." ~Yogi Berra

"You have to think anyway, so why not think big?" ~Donald Trump

August 17, 2012

Microsoft Makes Case for Upgrading to IIS 8.0
On the security side, Microsoft added dynamic IP restrictions, as well as an improved clamp-down process on FTP log-on attempts that doesn't shut out legitimate users so readily. In addition, a server name indication (SNI) capability was added to IIS 8.0 that's designed to allow hosted headers and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates to share the same IP address.

Apple has its eyes on your fingertips, for security apps
Apple spent a lot on the firm — $356 million — and appears to be in a hurry to commercialize AuthenTec’s technology, which uses fingerprint sensors to authenticate mobile users as a security application.

Google chows down on 3D-printed pasta
Google's staff benefits are renowned in the IT industry, and along with the scooters, free time for personal projects, slides and game machines, the search giant's employees have been enjoying something else — 3D-printed pasta.

Tech supporting BYOD 'not quite there'
Lack of control over employees' mobile devices and people's propensity to weaken security when deployed by uninstalling programs means bring-your-own-device trend a liability.

Medical Cybercrime: The Next Frontier
Eastern European gangs stealing computer files with Americans' health insurance information for resale? Remotely hacking insulin pumps to kill patients? A look inside the scary and shockingly unsophisticated world of medical cybercrime.

Bank of America Shows Progress in Six Key Areas
Bank of America launched its CSR report this week with a focus on six key areas: responsible business practices, strong economics, environmental sustainability, leadership and service, arts and culture, and diversity and inclusion.

5 Toxic Beliefs That Ruin Careers
People who hold these beliefs tend lack the energy required to create their own success. Don't be one of them.

Developing the brain of a driverless car
A team of researchers with Stanford University’s Revs Program will be scanning professional racing driver Brian Redman’s brain in an effort to improve computer algorithms used in driverless cars.

In a Fast World, Think Slowly
An interview with Frank Partnoy, professor of law and finance at the University of San Diego and author of Wait: The Art and Science of Delay.

Twitter edges out third party clients with tighter API rules
Twitter has revealed upcoming changes to the next versions of its API, which will tighten the restrictions around what a developers build for the microblogging platform can and can't do.

Quote for the day:

"If you have no critics you'll likely have no success." ~M.Forbes

August 16, 2012

Politics of Enterprise Architecture
Because EA is challenging the status quo of the Enterprise by altering its normal course for the sake of the future: EA is about strategic planning which inherently collides with the tactical thinking and action of Today - perhaps because the change is coming today at tactical speeds.

EyeRing: a point-and-speak camera for the visually impaired
... is described as a finger-worn device made with a 3D printer that consists of an embedded camera. It works in conjunction with a mobile phone as the computational device, and an earpiece that the user wears. A single button on the finger-worn device initiates the interaction between the camera and the mobile phone via Bluetooth. The phone then processes the information and sends it to the headset.

A Navigational Guide To 6 Paradoxes of Leadership
Leaders have to “be” many things, and a lot of them are seemingly contradictory - paradoxes that hover over our daily decisions and interactions. How we deal with these paradoxes can be the difference between good and great.

Why Do Products Fail? – Picking the Wrong User Goals
Even if you have picked the right users, you may have picked the wrong goals – creating a product your customers don’t really need, or solving problems that your customers don’t care about solving.

Bambuser DDoS attack may be connected with Assange embassy stream
The live-streaming service Bambuser, which is popular with activists, came under a distributed denial-of-service attack in the early hours of Thursday morning. Its proprietors suspect the attack targeted a stream from outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London

Explore the benefits of customer and supplier partnerships
Partnering like this can take the supplier-customer relationship to a new and higher level and improve each partner’s work processes. Here are five questions that you and your partners should ask one another in order to work together more effectively:

HP aims three-part effort at network virtualization

Hewlett-Packard is readying three new software capabilities that are designed to help enterprises pool their computing and storage resources across a network.The advances should make it easier for IT departments to link data centers spread around the world, shield multiple tenants' virtual machines from each other and control storage from virtualized appliances.

Exploiting the growing value from information
SMAC and other emerging technologies create the possibility for new ways to develop products, interact with customers, partner with others, compete, and succeed. More than a strategy for any individual technology trend or for combining more than one of them, companies need a systematic approach to engage with these technologies. Companies that have the most success engaging with SMAC are, in PwC’s view, rethinking their business and enterprise architectures and emphasizing three fundamental changes.

Android 4.0: The ultimate guide (plus cheat sheet)
This guide has all the info you need to get comfortable navigating through Android 4.0 and utilizing its updated features. And the accompanying cheat sheet provides quick reference charts that show you how to perform an array of tasks in Android 4.0.

Going social part II: Fight for the users
In the new business landscape IT must, as Tron would say, “fight for the users,” making the technology serve people, and not the other way around. This holds doubly true in the realm of social media, which many companies are leveraging to connect globally dispersed workforces and clients.

Quote for the day:

"Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

August 15, 2012

Don't SCIM over your Data Model
The older XML-based trio of SAML for authentication, XACML for authorisation and SPML for provisioning have achieved only mixed success, with only SAML having gained some traction in enterprise systems. But in the new world of the cloud, more lightweight alternatives are in demand. The "OAuth2 family" of protocol standards promises to deliver what the industry is asking for.

The Evolution of Integration
Paul Fremantle discusses the evolution of EAI, comparing the latest approaches, suggesting using Async Messaging, EDA, APIs, and doing high volumes, and underlining that evolution is not monotonic.

How to Make Licensing Audits Less Painful
License compliance is tough, especially after a merger or acquisition. The secret to success of any license audit just may be normalization technology.

9 popular IT security practices that just don't work
The truth is most common IT security products and techniques don't work as advertised, leaving us far more exposed to malicious code than we know. That's because traditional IT security takes a whack-a-mole approach to threats, leaving us to catch up with the next wave of innovative malware, most of which rolls out in plain view on the Internet.

A Prescription for Health Care Information Certainty
Fasano, CIP & EVP at Kaiser Parmanente recently discussed some of the high-level approaches he said need to be in order before any IT implementation goes out for a bid, and what, if anything, health agencies can do to plan for requirements and pools of new patients from federal health care reform.

WinZip Courier 4: First Take
This affordable utility provides an easier way to compress and email large files, and integrates well with Microsoft Office applications.

Radical IT Transformation
At its core, the transformation takes us from a technology-centric business/IT relationship to a business-centric business/IT relationship. This transformation includes a number of strategic shifts, each playing a role in the bigger transformation.

'Gaming as a Service': it was inevitable
Oracle's Bruce Tierney points to a recent case study exhibiting Electronic Arts'move into the online delivery space, and coins this spiffy new term: "Gaming as a Service" (yes, GaaS...)

Triple Crown Leadership
Triple Crown leaders have the goal of building and sustaining organizations that are excellent (high performance), ethical (do the right thing), and enduring (stand the test of time). As with the Triple Crown in thoroughbred horseracing, it is an epic quest that is audacious but not impossible.

Tina Roth Eisenberg's 8 Mantras For Success
In the second Build-A-Business mentor lesson, the founder of Swissmiss--a creator of everything from apps to temporary tattoos--shares the principles that have led to her success.

Malaysia Reviews Controversial Internet Law Following Online Protest
Malaysia will review a controversial Internet law following a day-long blackout of prominent websites over concern it could be used to silence government critics. Prime Minister Najib Razak wrote on Twitter on Tuesday night that he has asked his cabinet to discuss section 114A of the Evidence Act 1950. "Whatever we do, we must put people first," he wrote.

Quote for the day:

"If you have more than 3 priorities then you don't have any." ~Jim Collins

August 14, 2012

How does technology support Enterprise Architecture?
Through the creation, communication and improvement of principles and models that represent an enterprise’s desired future state, one can enable an enterprise’s evolution. The tool that helps one move toward that desired future state is the use of different technologies. The idea is to improve corporate agility, accelerate the time-to-market of new products and services and improve operational efficiency by reducing the total cost of ownership.

Building a Better ERP Estimate
There are many explanations out there to explain why these ERP implementations did not meet budget or timeline. Instead of repeating common information out in the ERP blogosphere, the author of this blog post speaks to a root cause that is typically overlooked by our industry – inaccurate ERP implementation estimations.

What Doesn't Motivate Creativity Can Kill It
You really can manage for innovation, but it starts by knowing what drives creativity in the people who generate and develop the new ideas that, when implemented, will become tomorrow's innovations. Unfortunately, too many managers unintentionally kill innovation because they rely too heavily on carrots and sticks to motivate employees.

Data Science in India: meeting requirements, not just budgets
It struck me that educational values and approaches in India might make Data Science skill sets there more abundant than in the U.S. and other developed countries. Perhaps Data Science will help India transcend the stigma/typecast of a tech talent center that is merely lower in cost.

Pixar open sources production animation code, patents
The code released as open source is called Open SubDiv, and “... implement high performance subdivision surface (subdiv) evaluation on massively parallel CPU and GPU architectures.” .... Which means this release is not something for everyone. But Pixar has released the software under a licence permitting any commercial or non-commercial use.

Universal M2M network coverage a 'major challenge'
The machine-to-machine (M2M) market presents huge growth opportunities and revenue-generating possibilities, but service providers and telecom operators will need to resolve fundamental issues of ensuring global network coverage and lower roaming costs in order for the potential to be realized.

BI Experts: Relieving Agile BI Choke Points
Organizations must discover why and where their systems are inflexible and how they can apply new methods and technologies to increase agility. These three tips can help you get off on the right foot.

Tougher electronic waste rules come into force in Europe
Much more electronic and electrical waste will have to be collected and recycled under the revised Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive, which was set in stone on Monday

BlackBerry 10 will 'win' against iPhone and Android says RIM
Research in Motion boss Thorsten Heins reckons BlackBerry 10 will rescue the ailing company. "We’re here to win," he told Bloomberg, and apparently he wasn't even joking! "We’re not here to fight for third or fourth place," he continued, which is just adorable.

All needed resources on SWOT analysis
There are many analysis tools used in supporting strategic planning in businesses, among them is the SWOT analysis. swot for management consulting Arguably one of the most commonly used and misused tools. Visit this page for all the help you may need on SWOT analysis.

Quotes for the day:

"Success in life comes not from holding a good hand, but in playing a poor hand well. " - Kenneth Hildebrand

"There is little success where there is little laughter." ~Andrew Carnegie

August 13, 2012

JackBe’s Mashup Engine Enables True Real-Time Business Intelligence
Being effective and competitive today requires that organizations respond to customers now; and that requires business intelligence (BI) in real time. In this interview, Rick Pitts, CEO at JackBe, discusses the shrinking decision window and how JackBe addresses that challenge with the next-generation Presto real-time operational BI platform.

Government to migrate critical IT infrastructure on cloud computing
Department of information technology, India is planning to set up a national cloud based network that connects all state data centers which would make that the backbone of national e-governance plan, which when completed would deliver many government to citizen and government business services via the internet.

Privacy law may hit cloud adoption: AIIA
One of the proposed Australian Privacy Principles (APPs), outlined in the proposed Privacy Amendment (Enhancing Privacy Protection) Bill 2012, will limit the adoption of the cloud in Australia, according to the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA).

Side-by-side comparisons of IaaS service providers
Thoran Rodrigues compares the major players and some of the newcomers in the increasingly competitive IaaS space, examining both their service offerings and how well they meet user cloud concerns.

Go Daddy angles to become bigger cloud apps provider
Before its CEO resigned in July, Go Daddy snapped up small business accounting software company Outright. Is this its next step to becoming a broader cloud provider?

The iPhone Has Passed a Key Security Threshold
It's still possible for a hacker to take over a phone, but it's increasingly difficult, largely because each app runs in its own isolated "sandbox." The phone even verifies its operating system when it boots.

Indian Outsourcing Firms Hire in U.S.
The recruitment drive comes as Indian outsourcing companies, which have long been accused by critics of stealing jobs from the West, are now encountering intensified scrutiny ahead of the U.S. presidential election.

Improved Server Performance and Reliability
The new Aberdeen Stirling 277, a 2U VMware-Ready server powered by the Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600 series CPUs and built on the Intel Romley platform, is but one of countless examples of how Aberdeen has solidified its reputation.

Choosing a Version Control System - A Beginners Tour of the Options
If you are beginner to version control, then read on, hopefully this will help you choose a Version Control System for yourself and whilst I can't guarantee it'll make your life better, if you find one that does indeed 'work for you' then it won't make it harder and I'd wager a decent bet that you'll find benefits you weren't even looking for!

Call Me (Or Email Me), Maybe?
Do you prefer to communicate via phone or via email? What makes you decide to get off the computer and make a phone call, instead?

How Hellboy Helped me be an Inspirational Leader & 5 Keys to Inspirational Communication
Let’s face it, work is not always fun. That, compounded with the grim hope that many feel in this economy, i.e. that they might never see a brighter future because of the poor performance of their organization, can cause many employees and even leaders to forget about what they are capable of. They lose sight of their objectives and wallow in the drudgery of daily firefighting.

Quote for the day:

"One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears-by listening to them." ~ Dean Rusk

August 12, 2012

Amazon launches social game development studios
"Amazon Game Studios is exactly what it sounds like: a new team at Amazon that's focused on creating innovative, fun and well-crafted games," the Amazon Games Studios team said in a company blog post today.

10 Programming Languages That Can Redefine IT
Here are 10 latest programming languages which approach the art of software development from a fresh perspective, tackling a specific problem or a unique shortcoming of today's more popular languages. Many of them are capable of changing programming in subsequent years.

New BI Demands Pushing Data Architecture Limits
change is both constant and fast-paced. Don't get left behind: With "big data" increasingly taking hold, the five-year future is going to bring major transformation in the way information systems are built to support business intelligence (BI) and analytics applications.

How to Create High Impact Leadership
Delegating is the path to exponential impact, seizing opportunities, flattening organizations, and leadership development. Why do so many find delegating so difficult?

Canvas Control Library & New Forms Based System for building Web Pages & Websites
Canvas Control Library with all the common controls and advanced ones like TreeView which due to the nature of canvas allow for great control over the graphical presentation of the controls and their item contents.

The 7 Traits of Great Sellers
Competition is intense, and if you don't take a leadership role in producing results for your clients, someone else will. In Lead, Sell, or Get Out of the Way, Ron Karr outlines a repeatable process based on the powerful idea that great sellers lead relationships in the same way that great leaders sell ideas.

The one-minute entrepreneur
If you're the kind of person who prefers to sit back and think about stuff, entrepreneurship will be quite a challenge. The default in the world of... humans... is that nothing happens. It takes hard work, energy, focus, determination, impatience, in short, an urge to make things happen right now, to make anything at all happen.

Protocols and Metaprotocols: What is a Personal Event Network?
This blog post sets forth several important naming conventions for personal event networks and also motivates and explains them.

Interview on Rust, a Systems Programming Language Developed by Mozilla
Rust is a systems language for writing high performance applications that are usually written in C or C++ but it was developed to prevent some of the problems related to invalid memory accesses that generate segmentation faults.

The Tactical and Strategic Art of Economic Models
Don Reinertsen outlines the need for using an economic model for development, explaining what that is emphasizing the cost of delay, how an economic model looks like, how to build and use one.

Quote for the day:

"A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks." --Oscar Wilde

August 11, 2012

6 Things Hiring Managers Don’t Get About Recruiting
You could have had great success in finding candidates but could have encountered many obstacles in trying to place those candidates because often many hiring managers mismanage the hiring process. Read on to know the five issues hiring managers must consider when trying to fill their open positions with superstar candidates.

The A/B Test: Inside the Technology That’s Changing the Rules of Business
One consequence of this data-driven revolution is that the whole attitude toward writing software, or even imagining it, becomes subtly constrained.

The Biggest Cloud Computing Security Risk Is Impossible to Eliminate
Despite all that noise, it's odd to realize that the incident with the greatest potential to cause a change in attitude among users and IT is the hack of a single reporter's backup account on Apple's consumer-oriented iCloud storage service.

Social still can't beat search in online shopping
Although the amount of site traffic generated by social media has more than doubled, it's still no match for search engines or e-mail referrals.

Enterprise Architecture – How a lack of planning can trip up your business
Without a clear view of an ideal future state of the enterprise, it becomes easy for businesses to fall into the trap of implementing disparate business capabilities, applications and infrastructure components which do not optimally relate to each other.

The Future of HTTP and the Controversy over SPDY
IETF has discussed the future of HTTP, and the next version is to be using SPDY as a starting point. There is a controversy though: Microsoft claims SPDY is no better than HTTP/1.1 with all optimizations turned on, while SPDY’s inventor says Microsoft’s tests actually confirm SPDY’s advantage in a real world scenario.

Google Open Sources Leak Finder, a JavaScript Tool for Detecting Memory Leaks
Currently, Leak Finder works with Closures but it can be configured to work with other libraries. Closures is an open source JavaScript library containing widgets, an event framework, tools for DOM manipulation, a unit testing framework, animation tools, and other components, being used extensively across Google services such as GMail, GDocs, GMaps and others.

Achieving True Business Analysis Competency
Want to improve business analysis competency but don’t know where to start? Need a way to make sure management will support the effort? This offering from DEA can help. Many forward-thinking organizations have begun dedicated efforts to increase business analysis competency. But getting started is one of the biggest challenges these efforts face. Success requires an understanding of current business analysis practices, careful planning, and clear measureable goals against which progress and success can be gauged. Without a solid business case to support the effort, work can lose momentum, focus and management backing.

Inline MSIL in C# and Generic Pointers
The following article discusses how to achieve inline CIL (MSIL/IL) into the C# language. Using said implementation, we can achieve things that the compiler usually prevents us from doing due to type-safety and other safety-checks. One of these things is generic pointer types which can be very useful.

Quote for the day:
"In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield." ~Warren Buffett

August 10, 2012

For Sales Forces, Big Data May Be Overhyped
We commonly see new technologies overhyped; their capabilities are promoted beyond their potential. Is big data your goldmine? Or is it a mirage that always appears a few more million dollars and months away? It depends on how you go about it. Doing it is not enough. You have to do it right.

The Open Cloud Company: A Day In The Life [Video]
To herald the era of Fanatical Support on the open cloud, Rackspace producer and video storyteller Dave Sims captured it all as part of his “Day In The Life” video series; short films shot and edited in a single day that illustrate what’s happening here at Rackspace.
Does 'shadow IT' lurk in your company?
Business divisions are bypassing the IT department, making their own decisions to buy cloud-based application services or use mobile devices, raising the specter of so-called "shadow IT" that's outside the knowledge or control of the CIO and the IT staff.

Nation-backed surveillance malware monitors Middle East bank accounts
A sophisticated cyber surveillance tool that monitors financial transactions with Middle Eastern banks was probably built by or under the auspices of a government, security researchers said today.

Apache Cassandra database upgrade due this fall
Version 1.2 of Cassandra, eyed for an October release, is slated to offer concurrent schema change and virtual node capabilities as well as JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) deployment support, Ellis said. With concurrent schema changes, multiple clients can issue schema changes at the same time and they will be merged across a cluster safely.

10 practices of highly ineffective software developers
The developer's worst enemy is really the eager technical manager who tries to deliver a project faster than possible and pushes developers to engage into ill-advised practices. In high-end enterprise and Web-scale projects in particular, that can result in wholesale disaster.

Virtual Panel: NoSQL Database Patterns and Polyglot Persistence
NoSQL database space has different databases that support different data storage patterns. InfoQ spoke with four panelists about the current state of NoSQL adoption, architecture patterns supported by different NoSQL databases, and security aspects when using NoSQL databases.

Presentation: Progressive Architectures at the Royal Bank of Scotland
In their presentation posted at InfoQ systems and data architects Ben Stopford, Farzad Pezeshkpour and Mark Atwell show how RBS leveraged new technologies in their architectures while facing difficult challenges such as regulation, competition and tighter budgets. They also need to cope with stringent technical challenges including efficiency and scalability.

The Management Upside of Mistakes
From misspeaking to making a decision that turns out wrong to a million other areas to show off your humanness, mistakes are part of the learning to lead process. How you choose to deal with your mistakes will help determine people’s perception of you and speak volumes about your leadership character.

Nimbula Adds Hadoop to Private Cloud
The private cloud operating system provider today said it is combining its Nimbula Director platform with MapR Technologies' M3 and M5 Hadoop distributions. The combined offering will lets organizations process and analyze large volumes of unstructured Big Data in private clouds.

The Mechanics of Contracting
Contracting should be pursued within a fluid context with principles, not by following inflexible rules. That said, having a framework to follow is an equally important element to success. Structure without principles is a formula for installed results, but principles without a structure usually generates more rhetoric than realization.

Quote for the day:
"Close scrutiny will show that most "crisis situations" are opportunities to either advance, or stay where you are." - Maxwell Maltz