Oracle has a phenomenal quarter. Paul Allen disses Bill Gates. Patent, trademark, and IP issues galore. Salesforce.com continues cash-based acquisition spree. HP continues rolling out its new strategy. HP and Oracle continue their war. Gosling joins Google. CIOs want to reduce the number of applications they maintain. IBM turns 100. World political turmoil and aftermath of Japan earthquake/tsunami hit the IT industry.
- #Microsoft’s Odd Couple
My ideas were ahead of their time or beyond our scope or both. - #Microsoft hires linguist in suit over #Apple App Store trademark
CEO of Apple Steve Jobs himself has used the term to generically refer to the competition’s offerings. - #Microsoft to #Apple : “App Store” as Generic as “Grocery Store”
“Although there is overwhelming evidence that the term “Windows” is not a generic term to describe operating systems, the term “app store” is widely used in the technology industry today as a generic term for stores that offer apps and not to identify a single company’s application marketplace.” - #Microsoft begins distributing Windows 8 to OEMs via Connect
The program is advertised as Windows 8 and Server vNext Pre-Release Program, on Microsoft’s connect site and requires a special invite code, according to one poster at the My Digital Life forums. - Tablets might be a flash in the pan: #Microsoft global chief strategy officer
Mundie said he believed the smartphone “as it emerges more will become your most personal computer”, while laptops would occupy a space he dubbed the “portable desk”. - Angry Bird Developer Attacks #Microsoft’s Game Update Policy
There is no reason why, when you do digital distribution on console, you couldn’t do frequent updates. It’s just a legacy way of thinking.” - #Microsoft can beat #Google, but only by letting go of a cow
What if Microsoft made Visual Studio better at making Android apps than Google’s own tools? - #Salesforce.com to Buy Social-Media Monitor Radian6 for $326M
Salesforce.com will pay about $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock for the company, net of cash acquired. The deal will also offer Radian6’s founders an additional $10 million in stock and $4 million in cash subject to vesting conditions over the next two years.Radian6’s technology captures hundreds of millions of conversations each day from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs and other online communities. Its clients include Dell Inc., General Electric Co., Molson Coors Brewing Co., TAPA and Pepsico Inc.
- #Workday and Hoover Dam: Valuing #Cloud Companies ( #Salesforce.com)
So, under these criteria, how does Workday look? Well, it’s pretty good. Take a look at the value that Flextronics is planning to get. Assume that other large, global companies will also want that value. And assume that once it’s in place, the product can go on for the 20 years that PeopleSoft seems to be lasting inside companies. As good as Groupon, ya think? I think.Which brings me to the second reason I don’t believe that story. $2 billion sounds like a number that a value investor made up because he’s trying to show how ridiculous valuations have gotten. But when you look at what’s actually going on there, $2 billion seems off. It appears to me that it’s rather too low.
- #Salesforce.com Acquires #Radian6 For $316M
While this acquisition does not solve the lack of a good analytics platform in Salesforce.com today, a Radian6 acquisition delivers social analytics or socialytics capabilities for Salesforce.com. customers. Social media monitoring delivered by Radian6 provides the first step in the journey to engaging customers in social channels. Advanced users often find they need to couple a sentiment analysis tool such as Clarabridge, Lymbix, SPSS, or Textlytics to improve accuracy. - Marin County sues #Deloitte: Alleges fraud on #SAP project #ITfail
Although this was not an SAP services project and SAP shoulders no blame, the company’s brand equity takes a significant hit whenever a so-called “SAP project” fails. Although SAP would not comment, I’m sure that company management is acutely aware of this impact. - Marin County complaint against #Deloitte Consulting on failed #SAP project
Deloitte also knew that because the County did not have any prior ERP implementation experience in general, or SAP experience in particular, it would be depending on Deloitte to oversee, guide and manage the project. Notwithstanding such knowledge, Deloitte made these false representations in order to obtain the contract for the County’s lucrative SAP project. - Marin County – #Deloitte Consulting contract on failed #SAP project
[T]hat Vendor has sufficient highly qualified personnel available that it shall assign to performance under this Agreement to allow Vendor to perform its obligations under this Agreement; and (v) that all of Vendor’s technical personnel who will be engaged in any material performance under this Agreement have the appropriate prior experience in implementing the currently available versions and releases of SAP Software, and that at least one of Vendor’s personnel who will be engaged in performance hereunder has achieved SAP’s public sector academy certification. Vendor has advised the County that it can fulfill and satisfy the County’s requirements, as stated in this Agreement, to provide leadership (including, but not limited to, with respect to general project leadership skills, change management experience, highly qualified and experienced personnel, industry-specific knowledge and best practices, and sound professional advice) to the County in connection with its project to impleme - #HP’s Apotheker makes pitch to partner with other companies
“I would much rather have a strong partnership with them,” he said Tuesday. - #HP’s New CEO: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Leo
1: He Is Channel-Friendly
2: He Is An Inspiring Technology Visionary
3: He Hates The Term “Emerging Markets”
4: He Is Advising Partners To Change Their Business Model
5: He Is Driving Big PartnerOne Program Changes
6: He Wants To Make HP A Security Software Leader
7: He Is A Good Listener
8: He Has Carried A Bag
9: He Sees HP As A Channel For Partners
10: He Pays For Performance - #HP CEO Slams #Oracle Before Sharing #Cloud Vision
Describing Oracle’s recent decision to drop Itanium support, Apotheker said: “It’s a rather clumsy attempt by Oracle to prop up a failing and deteriorating hardware platform,” a reference to Oracle-Sun’s SPARC hardware…
4. Innovation: A few weeks ago, Apotheker had suggested that HP lost its innovation soul. Apotheker seemed to reverse that statement today, saying that the spirit of innovation is “alive and well” within HP labs, in the market and in the channel. “We are the market leader in virtually every category in which we compete, from the consumer to the enterprise,” Apotheker asserted.
5. Four-part Cloud Strategy: To succeed in the cloud, Apotheker says HP will
* Optimize traditional environments
* Build and manage cloud-based architecture
* Enable transformation to hybrid models
* Define and deliver the connected world from the consumer to the enterprise. - The Value of Growth for #SaaS Companies
Lead generation not sales capacity, fuels growth. This is one reason why I believe we haven’t seen any leading SaaS companies emerge that haven’t been venture backed at some point to fuel growth.So, by definition, if you’re a SaaS company it’s incumbent upon you to find marketing personnel who are experts at lead generation. I know this is one of the critical hires in each one of my SaaS portfolio companies and it is becoming increasingly more difficult to attract this highly sought after talent.
- #RedHat names #Informatica CEO, professor to board
Abbasi has been CEO of business software maker Informatica since 2004. He previously spent more than 20 years working for one of the world’s largest software makers, Oracle Corp. - The problem with #Microsoft …
“Our early and clear vision notwithstanding, execution [by competitors] has surpassed our own.” - #Microsoft VP apologizes for Win Phone missteps
A month of missteps with phone updates led Joe Belfiore, a Microsoft corporate vice president, to try to explain the problems in an upbeat video on Microsoft’s site last week, only to post an apology over the weekend over appearing out of touch.Last week, Microsoft began rolling out its newest update, which includes the ability to copy and paste text, a feature that it previewed last October. The feature is also one that its rivals, such as the iPhone, already have.
- Why #Microsoft struggles to innovate – Video
Former Microsoft COO Robert Herbold says preserving Windows and Office stopped the company from innovating in mobile. - #Amazon offers dedicated servers on EC2
In short, it takes what is supposed to be a multitenant cloud and not only locks access to it through a virtual private network, but also ensures that no one else can run their cloudy apps on a physical server that has your cloudy apps running on it. - #Amazon VPC Adds Dedicated Instances
Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 instances launched within your VPC that run hardware dedicated to a single customer. Dedicated Instances let you take full advantage of the benefits of Amazon VPC and the AWS cloud – on-demand elastic provisioning, pay only for what you use, and a private, isolated virtual network, all while ensuring that your Amazon EC2 compute instances will be isolated at the hardware level. - #Oracle says no to Itanium: Embarrassment for #Intel, big problem for #HP
# HP gets hit. Oracle’s database is a major workload on HP’s Itanium servers, with possibly up to 50% of HP’s flagship Superdome servers running Oracle. A public statement from Oracle that they will no longer develop their database software will be a major drag on sales for anyone considering a new Oracle project on HP-UX and will make customers and prospects nervous about other key ISV packages as well. We should note that this does not to equate to either wholesale abandonment of HP platforms or an immediate dip in revenue. Oracle versions tend to live for years after their successors are announced, so many HP customers with current Oracle versions (which Oracle will continue to support on HP-UX/Itanium) will still buy additional capacity for years after the next non-Itanium versions are introduced.
# IBM can potentially profit with a combination of their P-Series servers running AIX as an alternative to HP-UX. However, since they also compete with Oracle’s servers and their volumes - #Google Hires The Father of #Java, James Gosling
Aside from developing Java, Gosling has an impressive resume. He received a B.S. degree in computer science from the University of Calgary in 1977. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1983 from Carnegie Mellon University. He wrote a version of emacs which is a class of text editors which has over 1,000 commands. Prior to joining Sun Microsystems, Gosling built a multi-processor version of Unix while at Carnegie Mellon University along with several compilers and mail systems. - #Google Snags #Java Inventor And #Oracle Critic James Gosling
The company had lowballed his salary and was micromanaging him and the other Java programmers. - Is #IBM next on #Oracle’s hit list?
HP may not be the only one that Oracle ‘defriends.’ - #Oracle Rumors Swirl as #Lawson Users Wait and Wonder ( #Infor)
The combined company would be the industry’s largest ERP vendor after SAP and Oracle. - Video: David Cameron: now is the time to set a business ( #Microsoft)
The Prime Minister was speaking at the launch of a business-backed initiative, Start Up Britain, at the Microsoft headquarters in central London.The campaign is aimed at encouraging people to set up their own businesses and is major part of the government’s effort to stimulate economic growth through private enterprise.
“The recovery we need has got to be a private sector-led recovery, a recovery with Made in Britain stamped all over it,” said the Prime Minister.
“So I want to make a direct appeal to everyone who’s sitting at home or at their desk thinking about starting their own business. Now is the time to do it.”
A business insurance discount worth 10pc from AXA, free guides from BlackBerry and training from Microsoft are among incentives on offer from 60 leading companies to help new entrepreneurs get their ventures off the ground.
- #Microsoft launches campaign of epic douchebaggery
Microsoft wants to be able to sue American firms for buying from these companies. So this is how it would work. If Ford buys a washer from a firm in China that Microsoft establishes is using unauthorized software, Microsoft wants to be able to sue Ford. - #Microsoft seeks ‘own personal unfair competition laws’
The law reportedly means that US companies are liable for pirated software used by their suppliers, even if the software was “not in any step of the manufacturing process alone but anywhere in that business,” said Groklaw.The legislation even paves the way for blocking the sale of products in Microsoft’s home state of Washington. Groklaw speculated that the real target of the move is to go after competition such as the Android smartphone operating system.
By encumbering competing products with legal liability, Microsoft’s own commercial offering, such as Windows Phone 7, will become better able to compete, Groklaw suggested.
- Why Is #Microsoft Seeking New State Laws That Allow it to Sue Competitors For Piracy by Overseas Suppliers? ( #OpenSource)
If a company overseas uses Microsoft’s software, a pirated version, not in any step of the manufacturing process alone but anywhere in that business, and then sells the parts to a US company to become part of a larger product, the US company can be liable for damages, tripled if it was knowingly done and it can be blocked from selling the product in Washington State. The “victim” can sue in civil court and the Attorney General can go after the “wrongdoer” US company, if a notice is sent and no amelioration occurs. But if the violation is of an *open source license*, the victim can’t sue anyone under the bill, and the Attorney General does nothing for you. It’s an exception to the law. - Whither #Oracle?
But about 18 months ago, they went strangely radio silent. No discussion of Social CRM. No product push. So recently, I went looking to see what I could find and this is what I did find. When you click on this URL for Social CRM its broken. - #Oracle #MySQL Website Falls Victim to SQL Injection Attack
Oracle’s MySQL.com customer website was apparently compromised over the weekend by a pair of hackers who publicly posted usernames, and in some cases passwords, of the site’s users. - #Oracle attacked – #MySQL and #Sun caught in the crossfire
As it turns out, the SQL Injection problems on MySQL.com were initially discovered back in January. The Romanians proved they had the data first, by releasing cracked passwords and disclosing previous Cross-Site Scripting vulnerabilities on the domain. Included in their release is the WordPress password for Robin Schumacher, MySQL’s director of product management.Amazingly, the release reveals that Schumacher uses a four-digit password for administration controls, three of which are the same number.
- #SAP To Launch Two IR Apps
German tech giant SAP is set to launch two separate investor relations apps for the iPad and iPhone.The first, expected to be in the Apple app store by the end of March, will contain IR publications like annual and quarterly reports. The second, scheduled to come out later this year, will include extra features such as a share price ticker, webcasts and interactive charts and graphs, according to Friederike Edelmann, director of investor relations at SAP.
- Enterprises Want Innovation But Can’t Quit Their Legacy Apps
Help! 85 percent of respondents say their application portfolios are in need of rationalization.Too Many Apps. Almost 60 percent of enterprise companies say they currently support “more” or “far more” applications than are necessary to run their business.
Time to Retire. Half agree that up to 50 percent of their application portfolio needs to be retired.
“Just in Case.” 61 percent say they keep all data beyond its expiration date “just in case.”
Mission Critical? Just 4 percent of respondents say that every IT system they use is considered “business-critical.”
- Application Landscape Report 2011 Edition
85% of respondents state that their application portfolios are in need of rationalization. - #CapGemini Application Landscape Report 2011 Edition
This report is designed to help companies understand the current state of IT applications and review emerging trends in application transformation and modernization. - Will #OpenSource Orion get developers to code in the #cloud?
The Eclipse Foundation wants to change that. This week, the organization behind the popular Eclipse IDE announced a beta program for OrionHub, a hosted version of its Orion platform. Simply put, Orion aims to be a collaborative development platform for the Web, on the Web. Once it’s complete, Web developers will be able to write, store, debug, and deploy Web-based applications using entirely Web-based tools. The question is: Just because they can do something, will they actually want to?Code editing in the cloud
What OrionHub offers right now is pretty raw. When you log in, you’re greeted by a Spartan home screen offering navigation among folders that are identified using a cryptic, Java-package-like naming structure. You can browse, edit, and create documents, but a “beta alert” at the bottom of the screen warns you that any files stored there will be deleted every 24 hours, adding, “Don’t do real stuff.”It’s important to recognize that Orion is not “Eclipse on the Web,” nor does
- #Oracle Tops Estimates as Companies Buy Databases in #Cloud Push
Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison is doing a better job than many expected in integrating the company’s acquisition of Sun by focusing on profitable, high-end hardware that runs Oracle software, Maynard said. That’s allowing Ellison to make headway on his projection that the purchase will boost fiscal 2011 operating profit by $1.5 billion. - #Oracle’s Fiscal 3Q Profit Surges 78% On Broad-Based Growth
Investors shrugged off a miss on hardware revenue to focus on strong margins and a surge in license revenue. The company’s shares rose 4% to $33.44 in after-hours trading. Through the close, Oracle’s shares are up 26% the past year. - Judge Rejects #Google Books Settlement
Judge Chin’s ruling changes little for Google users. About two million books that are in the public domain, such as works of William Shakespeare, currently can be viewed free on the Google Books site. They also are available through Google eBooks, a new online book store that allows people to purchase and read books on different devices.Google Books users currently can view long previews of another two million books that are in copyright and in print, thanks to agreements between Google and tens of thousands of publishers that were separate from the legal settlement. Millions more books that are in copyright but out of print are currently available in Google Books in a shorter “snippet view.” Had the settlement been approved, users would have been able to see longer previews and potentially buy those books.
- Trying to Stand Out in Apps Crowd
“The whole idea is getting chart position to get to top five or top 10, and then all of a sudden you get organic growth,” said Krishna Subramanian, a co-founder of Mobclix Inc., a mobile-ad company. - #Amazon’s Appstore Gets Good Reviews, But Big Feature Is Missing
When Amazon opened its Appstore on Tuedsay, it touted its new “Test Drive” tool as an “innovative new feature” that would enable customers to test apps on their computer screen before buying or downloading the apps for their smartphones. But the tool still wasn’t available for many people by Wednesday, although some customers reported that it had been up earlier. In comments on blogs and message boards, Amazon users said they thought Test Drive was a “pretty impressive” idea but that they weren’t able to use it yet. - How #IBM and #HP are Strengthening Their IT-for-Sustainability Offers
HP is partnering; IBM is acquiring. HP is going to bring enterprise carbon & energy management (ECEM) software to its customer engagements via partnerships with Hara and C3. - #Salesforce.com’s Development Platform Could Become a Major Force
We see momentum building in the platform as a service category as companies demand more social, mobile and open applications to serve their employees and customers. We have the only platform for building quality applications that is a trusted, proven solution for the enterprise. And with our strategic news towards an open multi-language, multi-develop strategy in the last 90 days, we believe Force.com is positioned to be a long-term leader in the platform as a service category” [1]Management also stated:
“Force.com achieved some truly impressive milestones. This year, we attracted an additional 100,000 developers creating a global customer community of more than 340,000 developers writing on the Salesforce.com platform.
- What #BI vendors have to offer
When choosing a BI vendor, the fundamental tools may be similar, but one may simply suit an organisation better than another. As Chandler explains: “The evaluation a client needs to make is which ecosystem do they want to work with? Then the decision can be driven by the technologies they need to consider. - #Oracle stops developing software for #Intel’s Itanium chips ( #HP)
Oracle wants to sell integrated stacks. It’s going to make software for hardware it sells and/or competitive hardware people buy lots of,” said analyst Curt Monash of Monash Research. “It has less reason to make software for competitive hardware of less market share - Using Consulting To Understand Customer Needs
We went to our potential customers, insurance companies, and proposed to do a short free consulting study that would provide a high level benchmark of their operation - Cutting the cost of innovation
“#OpenSource is boring… it hasn’t been the game-changing phenomenon people were hoping for.” - #Oracle could make $1 million from Sun.com sale
Additional third party sites have sprung up to archive the obsolete material that Oracle probably won’t move over to Oracle.com. - #Sun Blueprints Library Program Archive
- #Google Exec: Next Commerce Secretary?
Schmidt was at Google for 10 years, and reportedly decided to leave after battling Google’s cofounders over its decision to pull out of China. The company left China due to in part to free speech battles, and in part because Chinese hackers were attacking Google. - Commerce Dept: #Google’s Eric Schmidt could be the right CEO for the job
He is one of the rare business leaders who have a real chance of succeeding in Washington. I have known Eric for nearly thirty years and can vouch for the fact that he is savvy about policy and Washington, just as he is about business. Very importantly, he understands the significance of policy for business success and he understands globalization and the fact that globalization takes place in an environment in which the playing field is rarely level and trade is often not a win-win proposition.Schmidt knows technology, is well known in the business community but also in the policy community. In particular he is known as an out-of-the-box thinker and as one who listens more than he talks.
I wholeheartedly urge President Obama to move ahead with this appointment. It would be good for business, good for technology, good for trade, and would also be good politics.
- #Oracle CEO Ellison Saves Tennis’ BNP Paribas Open
[How long until it becomes the Oracle Open? -DBM] - #Cloud and web #OpenSource #database #Drizzle reaches general availability ( #MySQL)
Drizzle is described by its developers as an “open source microkernel DBMS for high performance scale-out applications” and began development in July 2008 as a fork by Sun employees aimed at getting MySQL back to its roots, powering web applications. Drizzle7’s beta was released in September 2010. - #IBM buys #Tririga software in ‘smart building’ play
IBM said it is part of its strategy to give corporations better ways to manage their facilities and equipment. Tririga’s applications will be part of IBM’s Tivoli division of management software. - #Microsoft Virtualization Helps Keep Target Stores Going During Peak Demand
Here’s Target’s story in their own words: - Meet #Microsoft’s guru of ‘design matters’
“My job is to be frustrated,” he said - Andreessen Horowitz’s Newest Partner: Crappy Software In Enterprise Won’t Work Any More
Other big areas of opportunity Levine sees in the enterprise include: - CEO showdown: Apotheker vs. Ellison vs. Palmisano
When times are good, you’re a genius, even if you’re goofing off. When they aren’t, nobody’s going to cut you slack until you turn the damn thing around. - If #Android Violates Patents, Shouldn’t #Microsoft Sue #Google?
Microsoft would pursue device makers rather than the Android OS itself: 1) device makers provide a more direct means of capturing revenue–and licensing fees, and 2) device makers can be challenged with the International Trade Commission (ITC) as well to block imports, which can’t be done against Google or the Android OS itself. - #HP ordered to release Jodie Fisher’s letter to Mark Hurd
“HP took no formal position on this issue, which is a matter between Mr Hurd and a shareholder,” Bill Wohl, a company spokesman, said. - Ernesto Espinoza, Plaintiff v. Hewlett-Packard Company, Defendant ( #HP)
I hold that Hurd has not carried his burden to demonstrate good cause. Therefore, subject to a narrow exception discussed below, I order that the Allred Letter be unsealed. - Restoring focus to a true veteran of Silicon Valley ( #HP)
I can’t give you a percentage because it’s early days to give you a percentage of what it should be, but you should count on the fact that over time it will be a higher percentage than today. - Valley companies differ in CEO succession planning
Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison has entrusted day-to-day operations to a series of top lieutenants. He told a 2005 audience that company President Safra Catz would become chief executive “if I dropped dead tomorrow.” - US government opposes #Microsoft in Supreme Court #patent lawsuit
“By allowing a lay jury to second-guess the PTO’s judgment even in close cases,” it continues, “the preponderance standard would diminish the expected value of patents and would reduce future inventors’ incentives to innovate and to disclose their inventions to the public.” - Washington backs i4i in Microsoft #patent fight
Should the court side with Microsoft, the decision could fundamentally alter patent infringement standards in the U.S., making it easier to declare a patent invalid. Both sides essentially argue that a ruling against them would result in a stifling of innovation. - #Microsoft suit over Nook centers on #Google #Android
Without actually suing Google itself, Microsoft contends that in developing Android, Google infringed on Microsoft patents. Earlier, Microsoft sued Motorola over devices that use Android. - #IBM At 100: Big Blue Brings on Hollywood to Tell Its Birthday Story
The first film, “100 x 100,” features 100 people who describe an IBM achievement that took place the year they were born. Joe Pytka, one of the most influential and prolific commercial directors, shot the “100 x 100” film.The second film, “They Were There,” shot by Oscar-winning documentary director Errol Morris with music by famed composer Philip Glass, examines the leaders and inventors behind some of IBM’s most noteworthy contributions such as the invention of the UPC code, helping put a man on the moon and the launch of the first mainframe computer.
- 10gen Announces #OpenSource #NoSQL #MongoDB v1.8
MongoDB adds several new features, including journaling that allows for fast recovery in the case of a crash, support for covered and sparse indexes, and incremental map/reduce. In addition to these new features, 10gen continued to invest in MongoDB’s performance and scale-out capabilities, with numerous improvements to replication and sharding in the newest release. - #Pentaho Upgrades #OpenSource Business Intelligence Software
Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition 3.8 release aims to help, with new functionality for guided analysis and building reports. Pentaho uses an “open core” model, with a core open source community edition and an enterprise edition that bundles proprietary features on top. - #OpenSource #Couchbase Delivers #NoSQL Server Under New Advisory Board
Couchbase Server’s schema-free document model is targeted at web applications. Its built-in JavaScript-based map/reduce-indexing engine makes it work well for analyzing and querying data, the company said. And the server’s peer-based replication capabilities allow full queries, updates and additions, even while disconnected from the network. - #Couchbase Unleashes #OpenSource #NoSQL Database
Membase and CouchOne announced their merger last month. Couchbase is now out with its first product release called Couchbase Server, which extends the capabilities of the open source NoSQL Apache CouchDB database.“Couchbase Server is a binary distribution of the Apache CouchDB open source software from Couchbase, Inc.,” James Phillips, co-founder and SVP Products for Couchbase, told InternetNews.com. “In addition to the CouchDB software, the distribution includes GeoCouch, an open source software project founded by Volker Mische, a Couchbase employee, and packaged with easy to use installers for 32- and 64-bit Linux (Red Hat and Ubuntu), Mac OS X, and Windows platforms.”
- #Hadoop 2010: #BigData & the Power of #Hadoop ( #Yahoo)
Behind every click across Yahoo!, there is a global cloud computing infrastructure, heavily reliant on Hadoop. We see the magic in crunching unimaginable volumes of data to create increasingly relevant Internet experiences for people around the world — and Hadoop is the technology behind that magic. - Next Generation of #OpenSource #NoSQL #Apache #Hadoop #MapReduce – The Scheduler ( #Yahoo)
In the proposed new architecture a global ResourceManager (RM) tracks machine availability and scheduling invariants while a per-application ApplicationMaster (AM) runs inside the cluster and tracks the program semantics for a given job. An application is either a single MapReduce job as the JobTracker supports today, it could be a directed, acyclic graph (DAG) of MapReduce jobs, or it could be a new framework. Each machine in the cluster runs a per-node daemon, the NodeManager (NM), responsible for enforcing and reporting the resource allocations made by the RM and monitoring the lifecycle of processes spawned on behalf of an application. Each process started by the NM is conceptually a container, or a bundle of resources allocated by the RM. - Turmoil prompts #Wipro to shelve #Egypt expansion
An executive from the firm said Wipro would not ramp up the team in Egypt till such time it had clarity on whether incentives offered by the previous regime would continue. “We are not sure if the Egypt government support to the IT industry would continue. I am a bit cautious,” senior VP and business head of Wipro Infotech Anand Sankaran said. “We will wait and watch how things pan out over there,” he added. - IT companies pull out all stops to protect staff from #Japan radiation
Indian corporates having presence in Japan on Wednesday accelerated the evacuation exercise, as the radiation crisis deepened at the Fukushima nuclear power plant on the eastern coast of the quake-hit nation. - Japan’s earthquake and tsunami: Indian services industry pulls out of #Japan
“Initially, it wasn’t clear if the employees are coming back or not but given the crisis, management has decided to bring back all the employees and started the process of booking tickets.” - Sponsors Line Up for Napa 2011 #OpenSource Think Tank
The Olliance Group and DLA Piper today announced SugarCRM, Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) headline the list of respected industry sponsors of the 6th Annual Open Source Think Tank, joining Qualcomm, Accenture and Fusesource as early supporters of the exclusive semiannual conference. The Open Source Think Tank is held each spring near Napa, California and every fall in Paris, France. - #RedHat ‘s JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1 Includes Enterprise-Class #OpenSource Data Virtualization Solution
JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1 includes:* Apache CXF web services stack
* JBoss Developer Studio 4.0, which features updated SOA tooling for ESB and data virtualization
* A technology preview of WS-BPEL, which delivers service orchestration
* A technology preview of Apache Camel Gateway, which is a popular enterprise integration pattern framework that brings an expanded set of adapters to JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform
* Updated certifications (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Windows 2008, IBM, JDK and more) - #Rackspace does the #RedHat thing with ‘#Linux for the clouds’
Rackspace is offering formal service and support for OpenStack, the eight-month-old open source platform for building Amazon EC2–like “infrastructure clouds”. - #RedHat ‘Virtualizes’ Data With New #OpenSource JBoss ESB
This new extension, called the JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform, is one of a number of new features on the just-released version 5.1 of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.The JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform can be used to create a data service from multiple data stores, even if they have differing formats. Feeds from the data service can be ingested by other applications through the ESB, allowing an organization to create a workflow that can volley data across multiple software programs.
- #RedHat Introduces #OpenSource JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1
JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1 includes:* Apache CXF web services stack
* JBoss Developer Studio 4.0, which features updated SOA tooling for ESB and data virtualization
* A technology preview of WS-BPEL, which delivers service orchestration
* A technology preview of Apache Camel Gateway, which is a popular enterprise integration pattern framework that brings an expanded set of adapters to JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform
* Updated certifications — Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Windows 2008, IBM, JDK, among others - #RedHat Fights Back
The company must make money, so why should it give away information that makes it easier for competitors to grab Red Hat’s support business? From a community perspective, isn’t it better that Red Hat gets the support contracts so it can use the money to develop solid open source servers, rather than other companies that, in Stevens’ view, no longer compete by developing their own customized distros.Not everyone sees it that way, though, and Red Hat’s behavior is making some people very mad indeed. Mostly that’s because they see it as against the spirit of the GPL. People like Maxamillian Attems, a member of the Debian kernel team, for example. “Red Hat Enterprise 6.0 is shipping the linux-2.6 2.6.32 in obfuscated form,” he says. “They released their linux-2.6 as one big tarball clashing with the spirit of the GPL. One can only mildly guess from the changelog which patches get applied. This is in sharp contrast to any previous Red Hat release and has not yet generated the sharp and sn
- #RedHat Settles #Patent Lawsuit For $4.2 Million With FireStar Software
Red Hat attempted to fight the lawsuit by saying that open source licenses (especially in the context of the GNU) was incompatible with payment of patent royalties. Red Hat used the GPL to for refusing to offer customers implementations of AVC/H.264 video codec standards. - #RedHat Obfuscation is a Tempest in a Teapot
# It makes economic sense for Red Hat to get any true kernel fixes they discover back upstream into the mainline so nobody (including Red Hat) suffers.
# RHEL-only fixes they discover should likely make it into Fedora if they are relevant, so no one on Fedora suffers.
# As to which downstream patches Red Hat applies to create RHEL, that really is their business, and if CentOS, Oracle, et. al. want to do the forensic work to sort it out, they will. And CentOS will again match RHEL. Those that care can do the work. Nothing prevents it from happening.
# For CentOS “customers” that are NOT Red Hat customers: they may need to sort out whether to move to a better supported gratis server like Ubuntu. This is ALL GOOD for Canonical long term. And Red Hat certainly hasn’t lost anything. Neither has free software nor open source.
# For Red Hat customers that mix-and-match RHEL and CentOS: they need to sort out what they want to do. Some will pressure Red Hat. Some will investigate alter - #RedHat ‘s source code shift may hurt third-party support but help RHEL
It’s well documented that Red Hat invests significantly in Linux community projects. These investments are funded by revenue from RHEL customers. Third-party RHEL providers are significantly less active in the Linux community, as necessitated by their business model of lower investment to allow lower pricing. - #OpenSource #Ingres Announces Innovative #Cloud Solutions and Strategic Roadmap
SkySafeSkySafe is an enterprise-grade cloud-based service that enables companies to develop and run applications securely without traditional administrative overhead.
* Elastic Storage – SkySafe manages all structured data in one repository whether it is real-time, transactional or analytical, allowing users to seamlessly toggle between analytical and transactional business processes, thereby negating the need for multiple specialized databases.
* Security – SkySafe leverages Ingres’ proven track record in securing sensitive deployments including those of national security. SkySafe includes encryption, role separation as well as fine-grained auditing.SkySafe Service Includes
* Customization – to match a company’s individual business needs including peaks and valleys in required response times, data volumes and support levels.
* Deployment Options – public or private clouds using virtualization technologies such as VMware’s vSphere.
* Database Administration, - The best of Leo: Highlights from interview with #HP ‘s CEO
I would qualify it slightly differently: #IBM overlaps 100 percent with us. I mean, HP has been doing these things for years — we didn’t really call them out this way — but this is nothing really that revolutionary or new. - #HP ‘s Apotheker comes up empty
Long on vision, short on details, Hewlett-Packard‘s ‘summit’ leaves us wondering what its cloud and mobile strategies really mean for the enterprise - #Java daddy: ‘Aggressively stupid’ won’t work for #Oracle
For the record, the company was “an extremely unpleasant environment.” - Gosling: #Oracle ‘s self interest requires good #Java stewardship
Oracle has stumbled with Java, falling short in dealing with Java user groups, he said. On the positive side, Oracle has made peace with IBM and Apple over Java, enlisting IBM’s support for the OpenJDK open source version of Java and taking over the implementation of the Java Virtual Machine on the Apple Mac, Gosling said. Apple also has signed on to OpenJDK. Additionally, Oracle has moved forward with Java platforms themselves, Gosling acknowledged. (The Java Community Process unanimously approved the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 7 specification this month.) - #Java EE7 Vote: Java Spec for #Cloud the Right Way To Go?
#Oracle ‘s development proposal for Java EE7 has been approved by the Executive Committee of the JCP. The vote was unanimous, with only one company (IBM) even commenting.The sponsors of Java Specification Request (JSR) #342, the umbrella JSR under which Java EE 7 will be developed, literally cited the cloud as the “theme” for this release.
- Former HP Channel Chief Takes Senior Executive Post At Oracle
Former Hewlett-Packard Americas channel chief Adrian Jones is taking on the job of senior vice president of Asia Pacific/Japan at Oracle, according to sources.Jones started in his new job Monday. In taking on the Oracle post Jones is joining his old boss, former HP CEO Mark Hurd, who was hired as Oracle president last September.
- #SAP Closes Tokyo Office Following Earthquake in #Japan
The German company, which has about 1,100 employees in Japan, mostly in Tokyo, has reserved 520 rooms in Osaka and Kobe that employees and their families can use as needed. The rooms have been reserved “indefinitely,” Pfahler said. - How #Google’s new CEO will keep company nimble
[A] picture begins to emerge of how the search company will change under him. Here’s our seven-part guide to how: - Next Gen Enterprise: Enterprise headlines and excerpts, 2011-02
[February’s Enterprise Software and Solutions news -DBM] - Next Gen Enterprise: Enterprise headlines and excerpts, 2011-03-15
iPad 2. SAP BI 4. Lawson is up for sale. Larry gets richer. HP launches a new strategy. - #Verizon, #SAP Team Up on #Cloud Enterprise Application Delivery
Verizon CaaS offers enterprise clients an advanced application delivery system comprising integrated delivery centers around the globe and underpinned by the Verizon global IP network, one of the world’s most connected. Clients can also leverage the Verizon private network for additional protection. - Burleigh named Cloud9 CEO
Burleigh most recently served as CEO of SmartTurn, a SaaS warehouse and inventory management company that he founded in 2004. SmartTurn was sold last year to RedPrairie, where Jim served as SVP of the on-demand group. He has also worked at Salesforce.com, Remedy, BayStone Software and Oracle. - #Oracle ‘s #MySQL plans take aim at #RedHat and #Microsoft ( #OpenSource #Linux)
Oracle execs, for example, pointed out that the performance of MySQL on Windows is now on par with MySQL on Linux. That can’t be good news for the Red Hat clan. - #Drizzle: #BigData -happy #MySQL fork debuts
Drizzle aims to be different from MySQL, stripping out “unnecessary” features loved by enterprise and OEMs in the name of greater speed and simplicity and for reduced management overhead.Drizzle has no stored procedures, triggers, or views – three staples of MySQL and other relational databases – and, in a blow to a large chunk of the computing and IT establishment, it doesn’t run on Microsoft‘s Windows. Also, there’s no embedded sever.
Instead, Drizzle is a microkernel built using C++ that relies on plug-ins to expand its features. It has inherited plug-ins from MySQL for the storage engine API, logging in, authentication, replication, network protocols, and scheduling but these have all been re-written.
Drizzle has been optimized for “massively concurrent” environments and is designed for “modern” POSIX systems, and there aren’t any installation scripts.
The GA includes log-based replication, the HailDB relational database engine instead of the Oracle-owned InnoDB, and “easy mig
- #Microsoft’s Top Dog In Silicon Valley Talks About Startups, Bubbles, And Pet Food
Microsoft’s presence in the Valley has doubled in the last ten years, and the company now has about 2,200 employees there, including about 400 working on search.* He doesn’t scout the Valley for startup acquisitions, but his team has introduced startups to Microsoft business groups who later acquire them.
* The BizSpark program, which gives startups three years of free use of Microsoft software and services, has 37,000 participants after two years, and 330 of them have raised more than $900 million in funding in the last six months.
* He was a classmate of Google CEO Eric Schmidt at Princeton.
* When Lewin was the CEO of Aurigin before joining Microsoft, he had to tell one of his investors that online pet food sales were not a good idea.
- #Infor Hiring Spree Stresses Product Innovation
Infor will hire people with a range of skill sets, from mobile development to back-end integration to UI (user interfaces), Angove said. The company has already been working with outside firms to build a “consumer-grade” user experience for its products, he said.The privately held company also said Wednesday that license revenues for its third fiscal quarter grew 17 percent year over year. Precise figures weren’t disclosed, but “the bulk of that growth was organic,” Angove said.
Infor will be able to fund the staff increase through its cash flow, thanks to strong revenue performance and operational changes, Angove said. Infor signed 400 new customers in its third quarter, according to a statement.
- Golden Gate ( #Infor) Is A Natural #Lawson Buyer, But Challenges Remain, Says One Analyst
“It’s not a must-have deal” for strategic buyers, Goldmacher said.Lawson makes better sense for Infor, he said. “It is in a similar space and Golden Gate/Infor has been aggregating the space by buying legacy vendors to build scale and therefore a better margin profile.”
- #Infor Customers Raise Profitability With Enhanced Asset Management
# Hundreds of MP2 customers have taken advantage of Infor’s automated and simple path to upgrade to Infor EAM for enhanced asset management.
# Through Infor EAM’s built-in flexibility, MP2 customers have easily configured and personalized business processes, screens, and dashboards to improve system use and productivity.
# New features provided by Infor EAM, including graphical scheduling, automatic data filtering, e-training, and active intelligence help MP2 customers improve wrench-time, decision-making, and safety.
# MP2 customers are addressing challenging down-time and reliability issues by continuously monitoring equipment performance and putting Infor EAM’s built-in analytics and action engine to work to proactively detect problems and drive corrective actions.
# Energy-intensive MP2 customers are using Infor EAM to directly address inefficient energy usage of equipment by continuously monitoring, analyzing, and sensing energy waste, and automatically alerting the workforce to c - #Microsoft #Patent Case Sees i4i File with U.S. Supreme Court
Canadian firm i4i has submitted its brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in a long-running patent-infringement suit with Microsoft. The case, Microsoft vs. i4i Limited Partnership, 10-290, is expected to be heard in April 2011. - Foreign firms launch #Japan evacuation plans ( #SAP #Cisco #IBM)
German technology companies SAP and Infineon were among those moving staff to safety in the south of the country, away from the effects of Friday’s earthquake and tsunami which damaged a nuclear plant north of Tokyo and which officials estimate to have cost at least 10,000 lives.Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O) has temporary closed its offices in Shinjuku, Tokyo and Sendai, but said its employees are able to work remotely, noting “limited impact” to its business.
International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) said its operations were not disrupted and had no reports of serious injury to its employees in Japan.
- #HP ‘s Strategy Tagcloud Buzzword Bingo Vortex of Doom
In this case the results read like a machine generated tag cloud sucking from the IT section of Wikipedia. It reads like a high school machine language experiment or the last phases of Dilbert struck by a tragic neurodegenerative disease. - Top-level exits to send ripples across IT sector
Bhaskar Pramanik, MD of Oracle India; Ravi Venkatesan, chairman of Microsoft India; Girish Paranjape and Suresh Vaswani, joint CEOs of Wipro; and Ashok Soota, executive chairman of MindTree. In the past few weeks, all these titles became redundant. These high-profile exits have raised a buzz not just in the executive hiring circles, but in the industry at large. - Enterprise headlines and excerpts, 2010-02
SAP and Oracle still haven’t settled the TomorrowNow lawsuit, SAP introduces ByDesign 2.6 including SDK, Gideon Gartner explains the development of the Gartner research process, Obama visits Silicon Valley, Nokia abandons its Symbian platform for Windows Phone, IT jobs recovery begins, OpenOffice gets forked, more evidence that Google Android contains unauthorized Oracle IP, another strong year for Salesforce.com, SAP introduces another attempt at CRM (and other applications) On Demand. I hope you had a great Valentine’s Day! - Your Project Failed? Don’t Blame Microsoft. Blame Me.
It’s almost always my fault. Why? Because I’m greedy. Too greedy. - Coca Cola fizzes on #IBM #DB2 savings
CCBC’s journey to DB2 began in 2008 when the company needed to upgrade its SAP R/3 Enterprise system to SAP ERP 6.0 which, DeJuneas revealed, would have required the company to upgrade its existing Oracle database and purchase new Oracle licenses. - #Microsoft Pledges $2 Million to Japan Quake, Tsunami Victims
This includes $250,000 in cash and $1.75 million in software and services to help those hit by the natural tragedy. - Enterprise headlines and excerpts, 2011-03-15
iPad 2. SAP BI 4. Lawson is up for sale. Larry gets richer. HP launches a new strategy. - #Google Technology RoundTable: #MapReduce
Meet four of Google’s Map Reduce expert engineers, Google Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, Google Fellow Jeff Dean, Software Engineer Jerry Zhao and Software Engineer Matt Austern and watch as they discuss the origin, evolution and future of Map Reduce with Alfred Spector, Google VP of Research and Special Iniatives. - Senator Patrick Leahy and #IBM laud progress on #patent reform legislation
U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and IBM Friday celebrated the overwhelming Senate approval of patent reform legislation as one of the country’s first steps toward modernizing the U.S. patent system which is essential to protecting inventors, preserving American innovation leadership and generating economic growth. The bill passed this week, 95 to 5, with a tidal wave of bipartisan support. If passed by the House and signed into law by President Obama, the America Invents Act would be the first comprehensive reform to the U.S. Patent System in nearly 60 years.
