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David Greschler, vice president of corporate marketing at Softricity Inc.

... this fall when Softricity Inc. releases its ZeroTouch module as part of its SoftGrid software. David Greschler, vice president of corporate marketing at the Boston-based vendor, explains that ZeroTouch builds on SoftGrid's critical capability to "treat applications like data." SoftGrid's Sequencer module "packages" applications to run on SoftGrid servers, which replace traditional app servers and work with agent code on end-user machines to create virtual applications. When users click on a program that's on a SoftGrid server, the application loads instantly on the PC. SoftGrid knows whether the machine is a laptop or a PC and can set a time limit for how long an app can reside on a mobile device before being disabled. With the arrival of ZeroTouch, end users won't need to hassle IT with requests for application access; the module provides end users with a menu of available apps. Because of SoftGrid's packaging and virtualization process, IT doesn't need to provision the end user's machine, nor does it have to worry about registry problems or broken DLLs resulting from application conflicts. Plus, ZeroTouch gives IT the option to appoint workgroup managers within business units to approve application access for end users, taking IT out of an occasionally political process. SoftGrid starts at $200 per user.

Hiep Vuaong, chief technology officer at Net Integration Technologies Inc.

Autonomous computing a distant ...
... possibility, maybe eight to 10 years in the future. So says Hiep Vuaong, chief technology officer at Net Integration Technologies Inc. in Markham, Ontario. His vision of true autonomous computing means, for example, that when IT adds a server to a network, the machine automatically detects where its resources will be best used, provisions itself, maintains continuous awareness of its condition and network, and adjusts itself accordingly. Vuaong says Nitix, as his company is called, is proposing its UniConf open-source tool (www.open.nit.ca/wiki) as a step toward true autonomous computing. UniConf does for network resources what LDAP did for end users on the network, Vuaong claims. He says IT can use UniConf to manage resources to minimize software conflicts when provisioning new systems, because the tool knows what works well with what. And what doesn't. Vuaong admits that the idea of a small Canadian company competing with the likes of IBM in the realm of autonomous computing might seem a tad quixotic. But he hopes Nitix's open-source approach gives it a distinct advantage over proprietary approaches.
Free ERP software being given to 800 ...
... companies that qualify. That's