Randall C Kennedy is director of research and cofounder of Competitive Systems Analysis, an IT consulting company. He was a former

systems analyst A systems analyst, also known as business technology analyst, is an information technology (IT) professional who specializes in analyzing, designing and implementing information systems. Systems analysts assess the suitability of information syst ...

for

Giga Information Group Gideon I. Gartner (March 13, 1935 – December 12, 2020) was an American businessman, entrepreneur, educator and philanthropist. Often referred to as the father of the modern analyst industry, he is best known as the founder of Gartner, Inc. (for ...

. Kennedy was a contributor for ''

InfoWorld ''InfoWorld'' (abbreviated IW) is an information technology media business. Founded in 1978, it began as a monthly magazine. In 2007, it transitioned to a web-only publication. Its parent company today is International Data Group, and its siste ...

'', focusing on

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

and other topics, but was dismissed on February 21, 2010. In his announcement of the dismissal, InfoWorld editor-in-chief, Eric Knorr, stated that Kennedy had been dismissed for violating InfoWorld's policies of "integrity and honesty", and for "breach of trust". Kennedy discovered an undocumented change in the protocol used by the

Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which ma ...

Net-Lib component from

named pipes In computing, a named pipe (also known as a FIFO for its behavior) is an extension to the traditional pipe concept on Unix and Unix-like systems, and is one of the methods of inter-process communication (IPC). The concept is also found in OS/2 an ...

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

Microsoft Data Access Components Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC; also known as Windows DAC) is a framework of interrelated Microsoft technologies that allows programmers a uniform and comprehensive way of developing applications that can access almost any data store. Its ...

2.6 that was fixed in the subsequent version 2.7). He also saw curious benchmark results when comparing performance of SQL Server on Windows NT 4 versus

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), releas ...

but was prevented from publishing in ''

Network World International Data Group (IDG, Inc.) is a market intelligence and demand generation company focused on the technology industry. IDG, Inc.’s mission is centered around supporting the technology industry through research, data, marketing technol ...

'' once

threatened legal action for his violation of the SQL Server software licence agreement.

InfoWorld dismissal

Kennedy was dismissed from ''

'' on 19 February 2010 for 'misrepresenting himself to other media organisations as Craig Barth CTO of Devil Mountain Software (aka exo.performance.network) in interviews for a number of stories regarding Windows and other Microsoft software topics' as Eric Knorr of InfoWorld explained 21 February. Knorr also explained that Devil Mountain Software 'is a Randall Kennedy business that specialises in the analysis of Windows performance data. There is no Craig Barth and Kennedy has stated this fabrication was a misguided effort to separate himself (or more accurately his InfoWorld blogger persona) from his Devil Mountain Software business'. Kennedy now insists he was not sacked, that InfoWorld were trying to save the situation, that he on his own decided to resign, and that he is having a good time on his island home on

Mauritius Mauritius ( ; french: Maurice, link=no ; mfe, label=Mauritian Creole, Moris ), officially the Republic of Mauritius, is an island nation in the Indian Ocean about off the southeast coast of the African continent, east of Madagascar. It incl ...

InfoWorld dismissal

References

Further reading