Interviews

For all the talk of businesses embracing Web 2.0 and social software tools, most companies are still at the very early stages of adoption, says Jonathan Yarmis, an analyst at AMR Research who focuses on emerging technologies. In his latest research note on companies taking their first step into social media, he says that companies must avoid the "Kumbaya Zone" - the place where social media is ultimately a time-waster and has little business value.

Paul Maritz became the president and CEO of VMware in July, after the EMC-owned company's board of directors fired co-founder and CEO Diane Greene. Maritz is now competing in the hot virtualization market against his former employer Microsoft, where he worked from 1986 to 2000 and led many of the company's major software initiatives. EMC executives put him in charge of VMware just a few months after EMC acquired Pi Corporation, a company Maritz founded. Maritz was in Las Vegas this week for VMware's annual VMworld conference, and sat down with Jon Brodkin to talk about company strategy.

As vice president of learning and development for US-based AlliedBarton Security Services, Rich Cordivari is responsible for the training community in the company. That means he oversees 150 trainers who work locally all over the country to deliver education to AlliedBarton employees. Cordivari, who has been with the company since 2003, discusses his strategy for boosting retention rates with programs that speak to the company's diverse geographic accounts, as well as the different generations now working for AlliedBarton.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. This time we chat to Prof. Roberto Ierusalimschy about the design and development of Lua.

In one of the final scenes of the movie, "Charlie Wilson's War," the story of America's part in Afghanistan's victory over the Soviet Union, Congressman Wilson is shown asking for more funding to rebuild Afghanistan, a request that is denied.

Bob Kelly, Microsoft's corporate vice president in charge of infrastructure server marketing, gave the morning keynote speech at Monday's "Get Virtualization" event in the US. The event had 1,000 attendees and kicks off a series of worldwide shows that may eventually have 175,000 attendees total. Kelly spoke to Computerworld about his company's virtualization efforts; excerpts from that interview follow.

Anthony Hill

Edward Amoroso is the chief security officer at AT&T in the US, as well as a professor who has written several textbooks on information security. Amoroso spoke with Jon Brodkin last week in Boston, where he delivered a keynote about network security during Forrester's Security Forum.

Google, which celebrates 10 years of its incorporation this month, remains strongly committed to its Enterprise unit and to the customers it serves, including IT and business managers and CIOs, although most of the company's revenue comes from online advertising.

Zack Anderson was one of three MIT students who caused a stir over the summer when they decided to disclose flaws they discovered in the Massachusetts transit authority's "Charlie Card" fare system.

EBSCOhost is a fee-based research service that provides libraries in North America with access to more than 20 million articles from 20,000-plus journals and magazines, all driven from two data centers in the coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts. The data centers are owned and operated by EBSCO Publishing, the second-largest business unit of EBSCO Industries, which is one of the largest privately held firms in the Fortune 500. Michael Gorrell, senior vice president and CIO for EBSCO Publishing, explained that green IT principles are fundamental to helping the company keep up with sales growth averaging 26 percent per year for the last three years and storage growth of 200 percent annually, without equivalent growth in computing and data center infrastructure.

Saving on energy costs is obviously a good thing, but to Larry Quinlan, CIO at the consulting firm Deloitte, green IT simply makes good business sense. "If you run green IT right, you will end up with a vastly superior IT organization," Quinlan said during his keynote address at the recent Network World IT Roadmap event in the US, in which he described green IT as one of five technologies that will change IT. From reducing demand for IT resources to thin laptops, Quinlan has no shortage of ideas on how to make green IT deliver on multiple fronts.

VeriSign is in many ways synonymous with managing the Web, thanks to its handling of key DNS root servers and of name resolution for .com, .net, and other domains. In recent years, it's had both strong ups and strong downs.

Does your personality type have relevance for your career? To answer that, we turned to Kip Parent, CEO of Keirsey.com, which markets the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, and Edward Kim, managing director of Keirsey's professional services division at Synergy Leaders.

Started in a dorm room four years ago, the social networking site Facebook now claims to be the fourth most-trafficked site in the world. Ninety million active users pound on 10,000 servers every day, uploading millions and millions of pieces of information in a given month. For example, "friends," who socialize in 21 languages, add 500 million photos per month.