Central IT within academic institutions has many customers – students, researchers, administrative bodies and more. So when a large public university noticed a service offering gap for campus customers needing environments to develop and host university-related web applications, they knew that a traditional solution – that of deploying virtual machines with operating systems and software stacks managed by the customer – was an unsustainable solution.

According to Federal Computer Week, federal agencies spend almost half of their annual IT budgets on supporting legacy applications. Even more worrying, about 47% of the government’s existing IT applications are based on legacy technology that needs modernizing.

While digital government innovation is on the rise, as evidenced by websites like Healthcare.gov and numerous state and local intra-agency and citizen-centric services, the underlying IT systems required to support these innovations – the middleware – is struggling to keep up.

The saying “new year, new you” typically refers to the resolutions that people make around this time of year – but did you know it can also apply to the approach you can take in honing your 2015 IT skills?

 All too often, federal IT personnel misconstrue software as being able to make their agency compliant with various regulations. It can’t – at least not by itself.

Ever wonder what to do with your old, out-of-date software licenses from Oracle? Technology is constantly improving and new programs are being developed all the time.  Some of those old programs are combined with others to form new product bundles, some are upgraded and repackaged, and some are simply retired and replaced by new programs.  Fortunately, the license migration is a way to make sure that your licenses remain useful and valuable over time as technologies and business needs evolve, and facilitates effective license management by you, the end user.