New ISO standard guides top management on IT governance

The new ISO/IEC 38500 standard will provide greater security against the risk of non-compliance. Inadequate IT back-up is adversely affecting the performance and competitiveness of many organisations. The new standard would help them in overcoming the hindrances.

François Coallier, chair of the ISO subcommittee, Software and systems engineering, commented that IT is the biggest enabler of future business and ISO/IEC 38500 will help top managements to evaluate and direct the use of IT in their respective organisations. The directors will get assistance in ensuring conformance to legislation, common law and contractual obligations.

The new standard ISO/IEC 38500:2008 will be applicable to all public and private companies of all sizes as well as not-for-profit organisations. It is the framework for the effective governance of IT. The standard comprises definitions, principles and models for good corporate governance. The principles include responsibility, strategy, performance, conformance, acquisition and human behaviour.

Alison Holt, chair of the IT Governance Working Group, declared that ISO/IEC 38500:2008 is specifically evolved to assist the board of an organisation in delivering maximum value from IT and information assets.

Apple’s new application development platform, iPhone App Store

Apple has just announced development of iPhone App Store. This revelation was made during the key note address by Steve Jobs at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. The company has created the powerful platform for development of new applications. It has also developed new tools to bring the new mobile applications to the market in shortest time. The App Store linked with iTunes music and video store is created to facilitate easy search and downloading of applications.

Ken Dulaney, an analyst with Gartner, is impressed with the speed with which Apple’s application development platform has matured. The large number of handset models, with different processing capabilities and screen sizes, make the process of application development, time consuming. It takes several months to launch a single application.

Apple has created a simple-to-use tool, which allows development of applications within weeks. Sam Altman, chief executive of Loopt, one of the users of iPhone SDK, described the tool as amazing. He disclosed that it took just two months as against 12 months in the past to create the ever best version of Loopt’s applications.  Apple has provided not only the ability to create applications quickly and easily but also a rich environment for the developers.

Software suppliers forced to rethink their strategy

Software suppliers have realised the negative impact of their highhanded approach towards their customers in forcing software audits. The head of the Federation against Software Theft (FAST) says that software suppliers would like to adopt softer approach towards customers and work in close co-ordination.

The highhanded approach of FAST and Business Software Alliance over the issues regarding compliance on software-license agreements had offended several UK businesses. To soothe the ruffled feathers, Soft recently launched the Software Industry Research Board (Sirb) to remove hassles in the software licensing for companies. Soft sought collaboration of Microsoft and others in the process of simplification.

John Lovelock, the chief executive of FAST, acknowledged that an aggressive approach with regards to licensing thus far had soured the sentiments. That no more would be the case owing to increased collaboration between software vendors and users. The Sirb is conducting a survey to understand their expectations regarding modifications in software asset and licensing management.  A poll conducted by Corporate IT Forum revealed that companies, well versed with software asset management (SAM), are not keen on seeking help of FAST or such organisations anymore.

IBM presents the Supercomputer twice as fast as previous fastest computer

The computing giant IBM has built a supercomputer for US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Named ‘Roadrunner’ it can perform 1,000 trillion floating point operations per second.
As per the IBM statement, the supercomputer will be deployed in US nuclear weapons simulation and will also be used for research in energy, climate change and human genome science. The computer is built with the combination of business and gaming technologies.

Roadrunner operates on 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips on IBM Model LS21 blade servers, and 12,960 Cell engines on IBM Model QS22 blade servers. It has 80 terabytes of memory, and is housed in 288 IBM BladeCentre racks, which occupy area of 6,000 square feet. There are 10,000 infiniband and gigabit Ethernet connections, and fibre-optic cable of 57 miles.

Bijan Divari, IBM vice president for next-generation computer systems technology, described the construction of Roadrunner as similar to that of human brain. He explained that tens of thousands of computing nodes when connected work in parallel simultaneously and create significant computing capability.

According to Divari, Roadrunner’s super speed will be used to simulate effects of nuclear explosions. The combination of gaming and enterprising technology will be deployed for realistic simulation.