Interop 2008 Day two of Interop Las Vegas 2008 opened with a modest IT proposal from Mark Templeton, President and CEO of Citrix.

In stark contrast to Microsoft's recent battle, here and here, to get Open Office XML sanctioned as an international standard, Google has quietly pulled off a standardization coup for its XML-based KML geographic information language with barely a whisper of dissent.

The loose coupling of data drawn from different systems is one of the enduring appeals of mashups. However, what if some of that data needs to be handled securely, or it is necessary to log in to some or all of the data feeds? What if the mashup as a whole represents some form of sensitive system - now security is an issue.

I imagine that is the question most users will ask when they see this dialog box:

When Google introduced the Google data APIs two years ago, it did not exactly rock the firmament like, say, other Google offerings.

Mix 08 Microsoft Silverlight team member Eugene Osovetsky has explained to a packed Mix 08 session how Silverlight 2.0, released as beta on Wednesday, interacts with external data and web services.

Tired of spotty network performance interrupting your web service's performance and of navigating the maze that is mobile application development?

Google can help - just don't rely on the giant's Android mobile Software Development Kit (SDK) when it comes to building in security.

Once more unto the void...

While databases have proved adept at holding vast sums of really useful information, they have lagged when it comes to serving up data in a way suited to human consumption.

MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos is surely regarded as a rainmaker among the entrepreneurial wing of the open source movement.

University computer science departments are rapidly becoming Microsoft-free zones, as Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) combine with Java to become the de-facto standard environment for students of programming.

Myths and legends It seems there is a disquieting trend in IT: concepts are getting steadily vaguer, and claims harder to verify.

Take web services, for instance. The very name is disingenuous. They are services of a kind, but they don't have much to do with the web. Their key protocol is SOAP, which stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. Well, it is a protocol, all right. But it isn't simple, and it doesn't access objects.

Salesforce.com systems are calling in sick this Monday. The company's service status page has been winking red X's as the software-as-a-service poster child struggles to wrangle its machinery.

From BEA Systems and its soon-to-be owner Oracle, from mighty IBM to a myriad of social network and online office start-ups, vendors have been telling us how the "Google generation" and Web 2.0 will change the way we work. Many have been flogging applications and middleware products, strategies and marketing puff to back this up.

It seems, though, the industry has overestimated the Google generation's net-savvy credentials. Two reports should set the alarm bell ringing among vendors and end-users championing Web 2.0, and force them to re-evaluate the demand for such software.

Five years and thousands of broken dreams ago, Veritas ate application performance management software maker Precise for $609m. And now Symantec is offloading the pricey baggage.

In the early 1990s when Visual Basic (VB) first infiltrated Excel to become Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), it helped push Microsoft's then-fledgling spreadsheet so far ahead of others that most people today are not aware many competitors even existed.

Marc Andreessen predicts a future where systems companies like Sun Microsystems see their volume businesses shrink and massive online services providers become prime customers.

Microsoft is throwing developers working with mixed PC and Mac environments a curveball with the long-awaited release of Office for Macintosh 2008.

Microsoft has pressed ahead with delivering a suite that drops support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), overcoming long-running concerns among the grassroots.

As the tenth anniversary of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice acquisition approaches it grows increasingly difficult to fathom what Sun intends for its suite.

Exclusive Oracle will hit its goal of delivering Fusion applications next year in name only, with applications ready for testing but the full suite not due until 2009.

Hands on The Portable Document Format (PDF) and Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet are commonly used for presentation of reports and data.

PHP, meanwhile, has become one of the most commonly used scripting languages on the web today, with 35 per cent of web sites running PHP. The TIOBE index of programming languages also indicates an increase in the usage of PHP.

Zoho users beware. There appears to be a nasty bug whereby a user logs in with their own credentials, but finds themselves logged into another user's account.

The UK's Ordnance Survey (OS) creates some of the world's best maps. Going far beyond mapping just the roads, OS provides some of the most detailed mapping, good for walkers, cyclists, and runners.

The problem is, the OS has some onerous licensing restrictions that make it impossible for a lot of services to use its maps. The "mashup" culture has largely had to get along without the help of the OS, with Google Maps being the data source that a lot of companies work with. Some time back, Google even tried to strike a deal with OS to use its UK maps, but it foundered.

Microsoft has announced Search Server 2008, a search engine based on SharePoint Server and SQL Server.

There are two editions, a free Express version and a paid for variant (price not yet determined) which supports high availability and load balancing on a server farm.

BEA blinked this morning and said it would enter takeover negotiations with Oracle, and anyone else that’s interested, at a floor of $21 per share.

The middleware vendor rebuffed Oracle’s overtures earlier this week, saying it was “worth significantly more than $17 [per share] to Oracle, to others, and most importantly to BEA shareholders".

BEA invited Oracle to play kiss-chase yesterday, as the database vendor came over all tough and macho in its effort to acquire the middleware firm.

It's time to get operationalizing*.

So went the call from Teradata as it revealed Version 12 of the Teradata Database and Version 6 of Relationship Manager. Both products, along with some new software tools and services, push Teradata closer to complementing its strength in "strategic intelligence" with fresh work on "operational excellence." Confused? We're here to help.

Interview Database legend Jan Baan is a man on a mission to kill old software business models and shake up IT departments everywhere.

But how is the self-proclaimed "passionate, crazy old guy" going to do that?

Baan reckons the answer is through simplifying business process management (BPM) software, not by building it to last but instead by building it to change.

Next year will see BEA Systems' first implementation of a slimmed down application server. Codenamed 'Essex', WebLogic Server version 10.3 will launch by March 2008 - BEA said at BEAWorld this week - and marks the debut of an architecture that lets developers remove modules they don't want prior to installation.

Facebook users may no longer be able to hide after the website announced it is launching a service that enables anyone to view member profiles.