Is your toaster enabling terrorism?

What can we learn from the WannaCry ransomware attack and the way we tackle Internet of Things (IoT) projects? That we had better invest enough resources to make, and keep, our smart devices safe.

Rearguard action

"One in ten IT specialists in Belgium is a cheap Indian," some media recently wrote. They work for minimum wages, ensuring unfair competition, and do not make a fair contribution to our welfare state, since they are not covered by Belgian social security. It was the socialist trade union BBTK who rang the bell. "Belgian employees are losing their jobs and the government is missing out on 26 million euros each year," they complained. Employers in the Belgian IT sector deliberately abuse the employment status of their Indian programmers to find people on the cheap. Ouch, that hurts.

Technological chauvinism

"Europe is far too dependent on Microsoft." I thought I accidentally clicked on an old article, perhaps from the end of the last century. At that time, Microsoft was in trouble for abusing its dominant market position to stave off competition. It was the start of a series of legal battles both in the States and in Europe, culminating in the Windows Media Player saga. You know, that thing you may have used to watch video on a pc, if you didn’t skip it entirely because you belong to the YouTube generation. Microsoft was fined a massive sum by Europe in 2004, but continued to resist strongly until 2012. In the end, they subsided. Or that is what we would like to believe.

Azure, the co-creation platform

You most probably know that Microsoft is the world’s largest contributor to the open source community on the popular GitHub platform, no? That’s right. When it comes to sharing code for open development and collaboration, it is leaving behind companies like Facebook, Google and Red Hat. All this is the result of a major strategic shift initiated by Steve Ballmer, and accelerated by Satya Nadella. One that will allow Microsoft to transform to a full-blown Software-as-a-Service company.

BTUG.be XL - BizTalk 2016 Slidedeck

On December 13th I spoke at BTUG.be XL about BizTalk 2016, the new features and the key aspects of its Always On support. In this post I share with you my slide deck.

Announcing our BizTalk 2016 launch event!

BizTalk Server 2016 is scheduled for General Availability (GA) later this year. To celebrate the launch of the 10th version of BizTalk Server, Codit organizes a BizTalk 2016 launch event.