Alex Williams

Alex Williams is an editor for SiliconAngle and lives a charmed life in Portland, Or.

Latest from Alex Williams

Rackspace Open-Sources A Node.js Library for Creating and Parsing XML Documents

The issues that come with connecting the legacy enterprise to the cloud mean dealing with heavyweight technologies such as XML. To that end, Rackspace developers have built and open-sourced a library for creating XML documents called “node-elementtree,” a Node.js Library to build and parse XML documents. Tomaz Muraus writes on the Rackspace blog that none ...

Social Boosts Financial Performance But Not So Much for Companies that Fail to Scale

McKinsey and Compay issued its fifth annual report about the use of social technologies in the enterprise. The results show how the most networked organizations perform better financially, are taking market share, and blurring the boundaries of their internal and external operations. McKinsey surveyed 4,200 global executives about how organizations deploy social technologies and the ...

Training Software for the Increasingly Complex World of IT

In a recent MarketScape report, IDC reported that 80 percent of IT managers believe effective training is critical to the success of a project. At the same time, nearly a third of IT budgets are set aside for education. There is a gap between the perception of education’s importance and how companies train their employees. ...

How Data Will Change the Role of the CIO in the Next Decade

Two stories this week illustrate how much data will change the role of the CIO in the next decade. The first comes from CIO.com, with a story about how the role of the CIO will change by 2020. In every example, it’s data that drives the change through apps, the cloud and services. The apps ...

What to Tell Your Boss If You Partied Too Much at IBM Impact

“The beer was so awesome I could not find my room.” That’s not exactly what you want to tell the boss when you get back from Vegas after a week at a conference like IBM Impact. Here’s what you do want to do. Give some good reasons why the conference rocked and why the both ...

Dreamhost Founder Leading New Services Firm to Support Ceph – the Popular Open Source Scaling Storage System

The original developers behind the open source scaling storage system known as Ceph have formed Inktank, a professional services firm that will be led by Dreamhost Co-Founder Sage Weil. The company will offer enterprise level support for Ceph, which has grown in popularity across the globe for its capability to deliver object storage, block storage, ...

VMware Project Octopus and How it Stacks Up to Google Drive

Google launched Google Drive two weeks ago. For me, the service makes it simple to clear my hard drive of objects that I want access to later but without the messiness that comes with storing them locally on my already cluttered desktop. There are other use cases, of course, but for a guy like me, ...

How Services Providers Can Benefit From IBM’s New Patterns Technology

Systems integrators and outsourcers have done very well over the years servicing IBM customers.  Building data centers from the ground up, integrating middleware and configuring it all in a secure manner can keep a technical services team filled up with work. But this week at IBM Impact, the new PureApplications System provided more proof that ...

Cloud in a Box? Meet IBM’s PaaS in a Box

The IBM Impact event this week is a clear reminder that the big enterprise technology vendors are banking on customers consolidating their data centers with the DevOps movement playing a focal role. But it’s IBM’s take that will sure to create much debate. IBM is pushing the integration of business process management and development tools ...

IBM Drops Siebel and Adopts Sugar CRM for World’s Largest CRM Implementation

SugarCRM is an IBM darling. They received good billing at IBM Lotusphere and they are getting it again here at IBM Websphere. Today came the news that IBM is giving up on its massive project to implement Siebel Systems and is turning to Sugar CRM for what is billed as the world’s largest CRM implementation. ...