Innovation for taking control of your IT infrastructure

I noticed that I have talked about books and investing, but nothing on innovation yet. So here goes...

Last year has seen a new IT category emerge - Change control. People (specially IT managers) have felt the pain of downtime due to unauthorised changes on the system and so far there were no good solutions for this problem. Now enterprise class products have emerged in this area and prominent players in this market are Solidcore (www.solidcore.com), ActiveReasoning and Tripwire, according to a Gartner report on this category. Solidcore has the USP of actually enforcing that unauthorised changes are not even allowed.

I think this category solves a growing pain in the market -- how to ensure that systems are locked down in the current state, so that services are available 24*7.

- Have the readers felt any pain in this area?
- Any horror stories you want to share, where an unauthorised (but probably well intended) change led to major loss of revenues due to downtime?

I feel that this area has scope for tremendous innovation and must be watched carefully. I will keep people posted on developements in this area.

All Fools

I recently finished reading the book "Fooled by Randomness" by Prof Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This book is about how people are fooled by random events and attribute to skill, things that could have happened by chance alone. By the time you are through with the book, it leaves you with a feeling that everything is random, specially in the financial markets!

Good thing that I read the second edition where the good Prof had clarified that its just "more" random than you think, otherwise I am sure that I even I would have thought that its all pure luck and skill doesnt matter at all.

Maybe I need to read the book again... but what do other people who have read this book feel about it?