voke Market Mover Blog

Oh What a Week! Early June 2007…The IBM/Rational Software Developer Conference or RSDC for those in the know kicked off with two major acquisition announcements. The first announcement made on June 6 was the acquisition of Watchfire . Watchfire is an application security company with a solid lineup of products and services that will fit well with and complement the Rational brand. Application security is one of those things that everyone *knows* they should be doing but conveniently and blissfully ignores it. This is IBM’s opportunity to solidify its dominant position in the application lifecycle by offering a holistic focus on application security. Watchfire technology and services is a natural fit in the application lifecycle. And, IBM with its broad enterprise reach is in a position to educate the market on and implement application security solutions. And, just to show you how serious IBM is about the software lifecycle, IBM announced its intention to acquire Telelogic . This mo...

Back to the Future Part IV Premieres at Microsoft TechEd 2007 Retro is in – all hail to the 80’s! But in software? I was fortunate to be in attendance as Microsoft kicked off its 15th annual TechEd conference in Orlando, FL with a “Back to the Future” spoof complete with an authentic DeLorean , a remarkably well preserved Christopher Lloyd and Microsoft's Bob Muglia transformed to Michael J. Fox complete with an authentic 80’s wardrobe and hair. Microsoft was a good sport and poked fun at some of its past predictions including what the world would be like if the once much ballyhooed “BOB” had achieved any market traction. In the keynote, Microsoft opted out of vision and presented reality. At the start of his keynote, Microsoft’s Bob Muglia said he would not give a “vision talk”. And, he was right, the listener had to make their own judgment about what was visionary or back to the future and formulate their own conclusions. The crowd of 12,000+ developers went wild when the comma...