Updating your Enterprise System Gently – without cracking any eggs I don’t think anyone could have predicted that Fortune 500 companies (among many others) would be running software written in the 1960’s and 70’s today. But for the same reasons that’s been going on,  that situation pe

In today’s world, business-to-business and business-to-consumer communications and transactions, include both unstructured and structured data. Structured data is generally numerical and can be easily searched. Examples would include spreadsheets or databases. Unstructured data, on th

In our line of business, document formats like PDF, DOCX, TIFF, and JPEG are critical to our customers. Often customers, even engineers, don’t appreciate the amount of effort that these highly complex documents and images require to be manipulated and rendered for display and other fu

It happens to all of us… You cook a steak and someone wants it cooked more. You plant a tree and your wife wants it on the other side of the yard. You carefully plan, design and create a beautiful document viewer but the customer wants the backend to run on Jboss rather than Web

Having been in the software industry for so many years, I’ve seen a lot of good ways to develop or integrate software applications. I’ve also seen some that are not so good. Everyone has heard of vaporware and knows that at some point you have to cut the cord on promises. However, wha

Many of us have heard the following sales pitch many times over our careers: We’ve got a product that’s carefully crafted with the “best of breed” components and tuned for optimum performance and quality as a turnkey solution. Oh, and it is also backed by our Fortune 500 company resou

Most modern corporate headquarters have fairly elaborate security methods, which include cameras, electronic locks, sign-ins, guarded server rooms, and background checks for employees. But when dealing with non-Fortune 2000 companies (where most innovative software comes from), should

Competitive Considerations on Technology Acquisition As part of a small company in the large market of Content Management, I have been an observer to many interesting changes in the past few years. We play in the same space as IBM, EMC, OpenText, Oracle, HP, Onbase and Lexmark. These

Snowbound is running a three-part blog series on the end of applets and what the future holds for web applications. Check back on and Friday for the final installment: Part 1 (Monday): The Clock is Ticking to Replace Your Java Applet Part 2 (Wednesday): Why Browser Plug-Ins are Being