Joseph Marques

As many people correctly predicted, Web services and their corresponding service-oriented architecture (SOA) have proven their promise. Companies and businesses are starting to not only integrate new components and technologies, but are also opening up back-end systems and legacy processes. The former is helping to end compatibility and integration issues of the past while the latter is working to foster growth and more forward-thinking ideas, thus exempting the need to waste time on costly rewrites of existing technology. Web services do not solely add benefits to individual enterprises; they also help to speed partnerships through quicker integration across businesses. This is a direct result of the abstract way a Web service describes itself, as it is almost complet... (more)

A New View on Business Intelligence

With better technologies, new architectures, and innovative ways of thinking about old problems, there are new applications for business intelligence and data analysis. I am talking about the power of the intelligent portal. But what do portals have to do with data analysis? Everything. A portal, by bringing together such a wide range of applications, services, and even entire businesses,... (more)

A Step in the Right Direction

IBM is known in the industry for releasing software products that are tremendously powerful yet tremendously complex; unfortunately, because of the latter their software installations are sometimes quite difficult. Actually, in their defense, "are" is quickly becoming "were." IBM has been putting forth quite an effort to revamp and fix the installation challenges that developers and cons... (more)