Wolfram Alpha gets supercomputer boost

According to CNet.com, concerns with the public launch of Wolfram Alpha later this month is withstanding the crushing load the Internet can impose. But Wolfram Research revealed Tuesday it's building the service on the world's 66th-fastest supercomputer. The machine, built out of Dell hardware by a company called R Systems, can sustain performance of 39.6 trillion mathematical operations per second, according to the November 2008 list of the top 500 supercomputers. That muscle will come in handy for Alpha, which I think of as a combination of a graphing calculator, search engine, and reference library that not only supplies some answers to factual, data-intensive questions but also does math in the process.

What will this mean for public performance issues? Will it make a change in your work?

Barclaycard hails success of adverts across MSN portals

More than 4.6m unique users visited a Barclaycard website as part of a major push via Microsoft Advertising's first 'two-screen' takeover campaign.Barclaycard ran a major campaign to promote its contactless payment service for two weeks in November, using Microsoft Advertising's MSN Live fixed and mobile portals.The campaign was the first home page takeover across both portals and generated strong results for the brand. The site attracted 4.6m unique users and 102,000 played the related...

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Shaking Things up With Alfresco Enterprise 3.0

Paula Rooney writes in this post on ZDNet that Alfresco will be releasing a major upgrade to its current enterprise content management system, Alfresco Enterprise 3.0, which will have many new collaboration features and services.

It is due to be released on Halloween, and it will feature Share which is a collaborative content solution that makes capturing, sharing, and accessing information across virtual teams much simpler. It will also offer support for CMIS specification as well as the Microsoft Office Sharepoint Protocol. It will be interesting to see how the enterprise will respond to Alfresco’s latest offering

How to Improve Enterprise Technology Projects

In this complimentary webinar, Jack Bergstrand, CEO, Brand Velocity, and Terry Assink, Group President, Brand Velocity, share Best Practices to Ensure your Enterprise Technology Projects are a Success. This free webinar will take place on Thursday October 2nd from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM EDT. Mention priority code G1M2014W2BL when registering. Here’s the description for the webinar:

Facing such historical economic hard times, senior management is looking to the IT departments and business to work together to produce more measurable and innovative ways to streamline and enhance processes that will make a positive impact to the bottom line. And where IT can not contribute to a positive business outcome, the pressure is mounting to cut costs.

Unfortunately, most organizations consider their Enterprise project launches unsuccessful and non-technical business issues cause 70 percent of large enterprise technology projects to fall behind or fail completely. It is critical to rapidly identify and overcome these issues.

Executives and board members need a faster path to enterprise technology project success. Enterprise projects can be improved and accelerated using a different approach.

Jack Bergstrand and Terry Assink will share their expertise to help you and your team gain more insight to the following:

• What is the failure rate of large Enterprise technology projects?
• Who are the major players involved in a company’s technology project?
• Why do large technology projects go wrong so often?
• How can board members and CEOs recognize early warning signs that a large technology project will go or is going off track?
• What should the CEO and Board do to steer the technology project back on course?

Register for the free webinar here.
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/625744907

The Case for Collaboration

The latest post on ComputerWeekly.com makes the case that effective collaboration could have saved us from the mess that banking systems are at now. Financial institutions make an effort to analyze risk, and so why not use collaborative technology to aid in this process.

Integration of collaborative portals would given the right people access to the right knowledge, thus improving decision making within all parts of the enterprise. Ian White mentions that people should not ask when and what collaborative technology should be used for, but how can the features of the applications be used to improve the organization.

CMS Watch Presents Enterprise Portal Marketplace Going Into 2009

CMS Watch in conjunction with the IT & Business Alignment Forum presents a complimentary one hour web seminar presented by Tony Byrne. The webinar Enterprise Portal Marketplace Going Into 2009 will be presented by Tony Byrne of CMS Watch on Thursday September 25^th from 2:00 to 3:00 PM EDT. Don’t miss your chance to view this webinar free of charge, as Tony’s last webinar “Evaluating SharePoint from a Business Perspective” generated a huge response. Here’s a brief description of the webinar:

Enterprise Portal technology underpins many enterprise integration and SOA strategies. However, going into 2009 the portal marketplace is in some flux, as older technologies and platforms become deprecated while new use cases around social computing emerge. Meanwhile, the rise of Microsoft SharePoint has led to divergent reactions among traditional enterprise portal suppliers – like IBM, Oracle, and SAP – while open source portal projects continue to expand vigorously.

Please join noted analyst firm CMS Watch to learn more about where the enterprise portal marketplace is headed so you can carefully plan your 2009 investments in this critical area.

What you will learn by attending:

· How the enterprise portal marketplace is segmented today

· Shifting vendor strategies in the face of SharePoint

· What open source portal platforms bring to the table

· How Portals relate to Enterprise 2.0

· Common enterprise portal use cases

· How to go about selecting the right portal technology

Don’t miss your chance register for the webinar by clicking on this register button below:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/875154842