Breaking Down Walls

Cisco goes open with Etch; plus, Google shows off its infrastructure, a whistleblower snags IBM’s deep pocket, Gates and Ballmer chat fireside, Workday signs a big deal and more software news of the week.

Open-source technologies and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) continue to break down walls and add to their ranks of adopters — even in outer space.

Watch for developments with Etch — open-source developments, that is. It’s Cisco’s new messaging protocol with a big nod to open-source developers.

Aiming at motivating private industry to innovate on products and services based on NASA’s investments, NASA is developing CosmosCode. The open-source project for space exploration software also has the goal of reducing costs of development and testing.

On-Demand Webinar:
The Death of the Enterprise Software Buying Cycle?

MR Rangaswami The recent webinar and interactive online panel discussion with M.R. Rangaswami, publisher of SandHill.com, Doug Harr, innovative CIO of Ingres, and executives from Intacct, LucidEra, and WebEx contained new insight about trends in buying software today. Don’t miss this lively discussion: Click here to listen to an on-demand replay of the webinar.

SANDHILL.COM BLOG POST OF THE WEEK:

VARs Adapt to New Realities

Technology businesses come and go, but as a category VARs are the survivors of the technology world. A couple of years ago an editor asked me if SaaS was going to kill the channel. At the time, it was too early to tell exactly what was going to happen, but I expressed confidence that VARs would survive as an important channel, even if they had to evolve in significant ways.