On the Mark: Tech crowd struts its stuff ...

13.02.2006
... at the Demo 2006 conference with an eye to the near future. You didn't have to wander far in the tightly packed pavilion on the grounds of the sprawling Pointe South Mountain Resort in Phoenix last week to get a glimpse of the gadgets, software and services that were being rolled out for IT's sharp-eyed perusal. And there was a little something for everybody.

Let's say you've got monster databases that your end users want to paw through to find bits of gold for the business. The folks at Panoratio Data-base Images Inc., a Siemens AG spin-off based in Munich, were showing off their .pdi Generator and .pdi Explorer tools, which can sort and display enormous data sets. How big? Well, Cal Ball, vice president of sales and marketing at Panoratio's U.S. headquarters in San Francisco, was analyzing every play ever run in the National Football League along 110 dimensions -- everything from the weather, missed tackles and whether there was a blitz or regular pass defense during the play. And he was getting answers instantly as he clicked through different parameters. That would be impressive enough if Ball was running the data on some fancy-schmancy eight-way server. But the files created by Generator and shown in the Explorer client were firing on a beat-up old 32-bit laptop. Michael Haft, Panoratio's chief technology officer, says that by late this year, the software will be able to handle vastly larger data sets even faster when Explorer is ported to 64-bit systems. By the way, Ball claims that he knew the Pittsburgh Steelers would win the Super Bowl. Pittsburgh is 8-0 in indoor games when the game-time temperature is between 66 and 70 degrees, he says. Super Bowl XL was played at 68 degrees. Bookies, take note.

Don't deploy a wireless LAN ...

... with lowest-common- denominator technology. That's when lower-speed 802.11b devices drag down performance for end users with 802.11g hardware, says David Confalonieri, vice president of corporate marketing at Extricom Inc. in New York. The Wi-Fi standard's backward-compatibility requirement devolves an entire WLAN to 802.11b speeds

when a slower device hits your 802.11g network, Confalonieri says. But, he adds, you can forget that concern next month, after Extricom ships new AnyBand AnyMode Dual Channel software for its EXSW switches. What's more, since the company's WLAN access points are all managed through the switches, you can configure them so they create a single channel, eliminating handoff problems for end users between access points. An eight-port switch starts at $10,000 with an equal number of access points. More than a few Demo participants probably wish Extricom had started shipping the software earlier, given the occasional snafus involving wireless network troubles at the conference. Perhaps then the common lament about wireless problems wouldn't have followed the occasional Demo demo disaster.

Database failures are so . . .