Here is the abstract:

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) builds on computer engineering approaches of the past to offer an architectural approach for enterprise systems, oriented around offering services on a network of consumers. For federal senior leadership teams, it offers a path forward, allowing for incremental and focused improvement of their IT support systems. With thoughtful engineering and an enterprise point of view, SOA offers positive benefits such as language neutral integration, component reuse, organizational agility, and the ability to leverage past investment in existing systems.

Source:
Leveraging Federal IT Investment With Service-Oriented Architecture

Some of the most steadily performing sectors, through both good and bad times, have been the very “vice” stocks that are no-nos for most social investors. When times get tough, the sinners get sinning. “Demand for drinking, smoking, and gambling remains pretty steady and actually increases during volatile times,” says Tom Glavin, chief investment officer at Credit Suisse First Boston. Alcohol, tobacco, and gambling stocks rallied solidly during two of the last three major recessions, in 1990 and 1982. “Many of these industry groups tend to be beneficiaries of the flaws of human character,” Glavin says.

Source:
The Next Catastrophe

Business to Business

Generally not acquired in an e-commerce environment.
Generally not an immediate sale.
Focus is more on website stickiness
Users will general ‘vet’ a company through it’s website.
The buying cycle may last months or even years.
Generally multiple parties involved in purchase decision.
Business to Consumer

Large percentage is e-commerce.
Online sale in a single visit
E-commerce, checkout process
You can make a user feel safe and secure by displaying appropriate payment and security logo’s.
Typical sales cycle may be as short as 10-20 minutes from search to sale
Generally single decision maker.

Source:
CTO Speaks at Online Marketing Forum, Stockholm

Here’s an excerpt:

On a Clear Day You Can Invest Forever. The time horizon: What is the time horizon over which the endowment seeks to function? Typically, nonprofit institutions other than foundations seek to operate in perpetuity. Foundations may hope to operate in perpetuity, but many may expect to bring their resources to bear on a given mission for only as long as the resources hold out… The length of time that nonprofits and foundations seek to remain viable is a fundamental difference between them and individual investors. Individuals don’t live forever. Personal wealth management may seek to preserve wealth for a lifetime, or for the next generation, but for the most part an investor with a vision of directing the use of wealth over a longer time horizon will create a foundation. Endowment managers seek to preserve principal and simultaneously pay out from the endowment indefinitely or for an extremely long time. As Swensen points out, this very long time horizon puts into place one of the key variables in the investment equation, plays out in preservation of principal and spending policy, and imposes a strong equity investment bias.

Source:
The Special Characteristics of Endowment Investing Part 1: How different is it? Taxes, Time Horizon.

Here’s an excerpt:

IT PRO: Virtualisation is a hot topic in IT. It is among the top four or five spending priorities for almost all CIOs at the moment. What do you think is driving that?

Stansbury: There are a lot of things driving interest in virtualisation at the moment. Energy cost is one of them. Hardware server cost is another. Avoiding building out new data centres is another and uptime of systems is the fourth factor.

There’s been a big move from the mainframe to client server and from there to PC servers. PC servers have proliferated everywhere, but most PC servers are running at a load level of about 10 per cent, maybe less.

Virtualisation allows you to push the utilisation on a given server much, much closer to 100 per cent. In fact, if a server is being overloaded, we can move that application to another server, without the user knowing. It does allow much greater server utilisation than was available in the PC server market before.

Source:
VMware CIO: We’re way ahead of our competitors

At last week’s Inman News Real Estate Connect NYC 2009 conference, several key suppliers of real estate market information participated in a panel discussion – “Crunching the Numbers To Find the Turnaround” – moderated by Alison Rogers, Licensed Salesperson and Author of Diary of a Real Estate Rookie. The participants discussed:

Key Real Estate Market Indicators
Advice for President-Elect Obama
Inflation
Projections on the Housing Market Recovery

Participants included:
* Michael Simonsen, CEO, Altos Research Corporation
* Jonathan Miller, Co-Founder, Miller Samuel Inc.
* Leslie Appleton-Young, Vice President & Chief Economist, California Association of REALTORS
* Terry Loebs, Managing Director, MacroMarkets LLC
* Pete Goldey, Chief Information Officer, Onboard Informatics

Source:
“Crunching the Numbers To Find the Turnaround” – from Friday at Inman NYC

Last week, the power of the Tuck brand was particularly obvious to me. For our marketing class, our “guest lecturer” was the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for the world’s sixth-largest food company. He walked the first-year class through his company’s brand building formula and explained the most urgent changes occurring in consumer packaged goods marketing – especially the continuing shift from traditional media (e.g., television ads) to new media (e.g., blogs, social marketing). His presentation was honest and fresh, and at the end of the lecture he encouraged students to ask questions and give feedback. How often do you get to do that?

Source:
Want to learn marketing from a Chief Marketing Officer? How about pick the brain of a Chief Design Officer?

To give a simple example, standard security best practices recommend the separation of the voice virtual local area network (VLAN) from the data VLAN to prevent traffic from one to reach another. However, unified communications enable soft phones to be installed on the data VLAN and talk to hard VoIP phones on the voice VLAN. Completely blocking the traffic between the two VLANs will prevent this communication, though IT administrators may allow traffic between the two VLANs freely. Such a policy can enable legitimate communication between the two VLANs, but if not monitored, it also allows worms, viruses and other attacks to cross over to the other side and vice-versa.

All enterprises do not yet deploy soft phones, but VoIP soft phones are becoming an integral part of many unified communications frameworks. One of the reasons is that they enable software-based migration of end user devices to VoIP. Additionally, soft phones also enable users to be reachable wherever they take their laptops. Even if the enterprise does not expressly deploy VoIP soft phones, employees may use a freely available VoIP soft phone with several public VoIP service providers. It is not wise to ignore VoIP threats when investing resources to protect confidential data and assets residing on a data network. Equal importance must be given to protecting VoIP/UC devices to achieve comprehensive security across the enterprise.

Source:
EXPLOITING VOIP VULNERABILITIES – PART 1/2

1. MANAGE EXPECTATIONS: Our vision was grandiose. Unfortunately, so were those of E-Trade, AmeriTrade, TD Waterhouse and ten other firms offering similar services. Too many people fishing in the same pond makes for a poor trip. We knew that the obstacles were great. We simply failed to communicate realistic expectations for our program’s efforts.
2. KEEP THE GUNPOWDER DRY: Like a bad Texas hold ‘em player, we went all-in too early in the game. If funds had been held back, we may have been able to make course corrections that would have allowed us to get closer to the goal over a more protracted period of time.
3. DON’T BE IN SUCH A HURRY: Sure we were caught up in the dot.com frenzy. In truth we were never a company built to last. We were built to be sold at maximum multiples. But time is a marketer’s best friend. Competitors stumble. Market conditions change. Opportunity is always just another few feet down the road. Keep driving.
4. THE DEVIL REMAINS IN THE DETAILS:We didn’t make a colossal blunder. There was no “if we had only done this differently” moment. We simply were nicked to death by a thousand small paper cuts. As marketers, we tend to get swept up by the “big idea” when in truth 100 little ideas may have ultimately generated greater success.
5. BE TRANSPARENT: Marketing directors live in the glass fishbowl. It’s likely the only job in the company that everyone from the receptionist to the billing coordinator feels confident that they can evaluate. For me it was the software programmers from Bangladesh that were my barometers. Twenty-four hours after getting their work permits, they were experts in their judgment of our promotional efforts. I chafed.

Source:
IT’S THE SCOREBOARD NOT STATISTICS

Here’s an excerpt:

WebInkNow: What have you learned about how people use the Web to buy or sell real estate that prompted this move?

“We’ve learned that people who are in the market to buy or sell a home utilize the Internet heavily. And the closer they get to a real estate transaction, the more they use the Web. They often self-identify when they are on various real estate sites, and they clearly identify the geographic locations and properties that they are interested in. Our online initiatives will be focused on ensuring that our listings and sales professionals are positioned in as many online channels as possible to meet the consumers’ needs and then enable the transaction via an advanced CRM platform.”

Source:
CENTURY 21 moves TV ad spend to online: Bev Thorne, CMO, tell us why