In this week’s Computer Weekly, we look at the IT challenges facing retailers, as consumers turn increasingly to web and mobile shopping channels. Oracle president Mark Hurd talks about how the supplier intends to simplify IT infrastructures. And new government CIO Andy Nelson discusses how he plans to transform Whitehall IT. Read the issue now. 

The value of the IT market for smart cities globally is approximately $35bn, according to this in depth analysis from Ovum. 

In this week’s Computer Weekly, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude talks about releasing government datasets to the public and why open data will drive the next industrial revolution. We also review the latest test version of Windows 8 and see how it shapes up for tablet computers and business users and much more. 

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) enables different programs, applications, and tools to interact via self-contained services that do not depend on the context or state of the other service. This white paper provides insight into the top-four worst practices for SOA integration, and how to avoid and/or overcome these worst practices. 

Read this expert e-book by BI visionary Wayne Eckerson and gain insight into the growing adoption rates of big data technology and learn why companies are finally recognizing its many benefits. Eckerson offers a comparison of open-source options and analytical platforms, and also dives into an analysis on the varying types of processing systems. 

Over the course of 2010 and 2011, Forrester Research spoke to hundreds of customers about their enterprise service bus (ESB) activities, and conducted briefings and demonstration reviews as well as over twenty customer interviews to evaluate five commercial and four open source ESB product vendors. Access this paper to examine Forrester's findings. 

<p>Read this white paper to uncover exactly what sets Red Hat JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform apart from other vendors. Gain an in-depth overview of the product and how it has evolved to become a marketplace leader.  Weigh the pros and cons of a Red Hat investment and decide if it's the right move for you.</p> 

Compare the performance of real enterprise workloads and applications such as SAP, Oracle database and IBM DB2 on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) in this brief summary. Discover how you can leverage an open source virtualization platform to gain 96 percent or more bare metal performance. 

Read this case study to learn how one growing Euopean retailer was able to migrate to an architecture that could support real-time delivery of shop data to the data center for processing and real-time communication of pricing events to its shops using open source integration software. 

<p>Object-based file systems offer performance improvements in HPC environments, but many companies are unsure which market options are worth evaluating. This expert e-guide examines several notable offerings and explains how they can eliminate I/O bottlenecks in HPC architectures.</p>