Bob Zurek is CTO and VP Product Management for Infobright a leading open source data warehouse company. Before joining Infobright, Bob was CTO and VP Products at EnterpriseDB, Bob has also been Director of Strategy with IBM Information Platform and Solutions division. While at IBM, he had the responsibility for driving and executing the technical strategy for IBM's Information Server as it related to software, hardware, services, vertical industries, and emerging markets. Zurek has also founded or co-founded several technology startups and has also been VP Technologies and Fellow at Sybase and VP at Powersoft. Zurek is a frequent speaker on topics of middleware technologies and was VP of Product Management and Advanced Technologies at Ascential Software prior to the acquisition of Ascential by IBM. The postings on this site are his own and don't necessarily represent IBM positions, strategies or opinions.

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Try my LinkedIn poll found here: http://polls.linkedin.com/p/36240/fuaes

SpringSource Acquires Hyperic

Just recently CohesionSG wrote that we could expect to see an increase in consolidation in the open source market. Today we hear about SpringSource acquiring Hyperic. After raising close to $10 million (Continue Reading)

Ten Things You Should Know About PostgreSQL

At CohesionSG, we just completed a write up about the Ten Things You Should Know About PostgreSQL (readmore)

EnterpriseDB Helps Make DB2 An Attractive Alternative To Oracle

One year ago, EnterpriseDB announced that IBM had made a strategic investment in the company, yet no one in the press really speculated that the investment was geared towards using the Oracle compatibility interface from EnterpriseDB as a key feature in the newest version of DB2. Well, today, we see that IBM DB2 V9.7 is now featuring the Oracle compatibility technology provided by EnterpriseDB. Let's take a look at what this means: (Continue Reading)

IBM and Red Hat make a stronger combination and team than Oracle and Sun

We at CohesionSG believe that IBM is better off without Sun and should seriously consider acquiring Red Hat now that Oracle has its hands on Sun.
The combination of IBM and Red Hat provides a winning combination on a number of fronts. Let’s examine (continue reading)

Raise Your Pay As A DBA

Like employees in every department, the best DBAs are constantly seeking to increase the value of their contributions and, correspondingly, to increase their compensation and to advance in their organizations. Increasing knowledge and skills and taking more important responsibilities are time-honored methods for career advancement. Here are 10 concrete suggestions for DBAs looking to get ahead. (Continue Reading)

Time Shift Your Phone Calls With RebelVox

We've been closely watching an emerging new communications company by the name of RebelVox and so far, we've been impressed with their efforts. RebelVox is on the path to fundamentally changing the way we handle phone calls thru a new experience model that closely resembles the way we work with IM, SMS and email. Continue Reading..

What Sun Employees Can Look Foward To

What Sun Employees Can Look Forward To After Being Acquired By IBM

The possibility of IBM buying Sun  has resulted in thousands of news articles, blog postings and forum discussion on topics including open source, mainframes, unix, java, mysql and more yet no one is really talking about what transpires during an acquistion by IBM. As a former executive that has gone through an acquistion by IBM (Ascential Software), I'm (read more)

Do You Plan On Using Some Kind of Cloud Offering

Let us know at this poll found here.

College Admission Process Has Lots Of Questions - Technology Can Help

Getting through the college admission process can be complex and confusing at times.  Right now, high school juniors and their parents will be ramping up to attend college tours this spring and will soon be deep into the admission process. Having recently gone through this process, a few friend of mine and I have put together this College FAQ website called MyCollegeFAQ.com to help students and parents with their college admission questions. We also get help from students, admission officers, college admission advisors and others on the site. So far we are up to almost 120 question and answers and that is just the tip of the iceberg. The good news is that several high schools also love the product and find it very helpful for their student population. Every student and parent have many of the same questions over and over about the college admission process. Working on this site using open source software has been a great deal of fun showing that technology can help many. Please feel free to pass this website along to others that are about to go through the admission process. One of the cool question and answers has been "What does an acceptance letter look like", check out the answer here. Enjoy.

What is your favorite Data Integration Solution?

Take the poll.

http://twtpoll.com/yfu6i8

Technology that will impact Business Intelligence in 2009

Worth taking a look at the results of this survey found here.

http://twtpoll.com/r/ck1bl7

A fogged up iPhone App

I've seen and played with a great deal of iPhone apps, but this one has to take be one of the most unique. Just imagine what would happen if the screen on your iPhone happened to fog up, kind of like the mirror in a bathroom after a hot shower. Check it out here

Wishing you a Happy New Year - 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 1, 0

Remember, the countdown is 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 1, 0 this year. Adding one second to all the clocks this year. Have a great celebration and a Happy New Year!!

Bob Z.

Create Software Mockups In Minutes. Try Balsamiq

Every once in a while, a very slick little startup and innovation jumps on to the scene in the software development tools marketplace. In this case, its Balsamiq, a very slick, well built and easy to use solution for rapidly creating a software solution mockup. I've been using Balsamiq for several weeks now on my Mac and its one of the coolest tools I've used for some time. If you haven't heard about or tried Balsamiq out, then I would strongly suggest you jump over to this link to see a video of the tool and several sample software mockups created by the developer of Balsamiq, Giacomo 'Peldi' Guilizzoni.  Also here is a screen shot of a sample mockup built with Balsamiq.

Having a solution like this in your company can help you showcase a new solution, or concept to end users, developers and your management team. It strongly reminds me of how animators work on a new film story and concept. It's called storyboarding (as if you haven't heard that before). I'm looking forward to seeing this solution grow in the marketplace. One feature I wish it had was the ability to embed an image anywhere in the mockup.

Enjoy taking for a test drive, better yet, it is well worth the investment if you chose to purchase the tool to support the efforts of the company and founders.