I was quoted in an article in the Wall Street Journal's SmartMoney Magazine today concerning the future of Software as a Service (SaaS).  This is a trend that has developed in the past four years and become a viable option for more and more functions to be provided over the Internet.  We even see SAP taking this strategy for delivery of capabilities to Small and Medium Enterprises with their recent Business ByDesign suite.  The basic idea is that you can avoid the heavy capital outlays up front and have immediate functionality akin to the features large corporations enjoy.

Lately, the IT world has been humming with a variety of acronyms and buzzwords as usual. We hear about SOA and ITIL as well as "virtualization." Here virtualization generally refers to the ability to separate the computational capabilities associated with a business process from specific servers or other hardware. In effect, grid computing in which any terminal on a given grid can access the functions available.

Project management used to be well-characterized as managing timelines to complete fully-specified goals within budget. Sometimes this characterization is still adequate when we conduct maintenance or standardized projects. On the other hand, recognizing that projects are the main vehicle for innovating and implementing strategy in business today has led to some new thinking at the Emory Goizueta Business School.

As we continue to see Apple inroads into the Windows PC market, people keep looking for solutions for running the applications that are Windows-only on a Mac. I have faced this need for years. On the old systems (PowerPC G3-G5) we had options like SoftWindows and VirtualPC. With my G5 and 1.5 GB of memory, I can actually run Windows 2000 at about 50% speed using VirtualPC.