Congratulations to Werner Vogels, the now legendary CTO of Amazon and one of the principle drivers of the Amazon Web Services vision. InfoWorld announced Sunday that Werner earned its CTO of the Year award. The accolades are rolling in from all over, but I think all agree that this was a well-deserved recognition for Werner and his team. In fact, Werner's recognition of the team effort that led to this award just makes him that much more of a class act.
What leaves me shaking my head, however, is that it took this long to see the incredible feat that Amazon pulled off, and the leadership that pushed a retail goods company to see compute capacity as a logical extension of their business.... Read More
From Jason Boche's blog:
Today at the Minneapolis VMware User Group (VMUG) meeting, VMware employees disclosed to a group of 150+ attendees the new name for the next generation of Virtual Infrastructure many have been referring to as VI4 or VI.next. The new name is VMware vSphere. I value and respect the various relationships I have with VMware and thus before posting this news, I checked with authoritative sources inside VMware. VMware Marketing has endorsed the release of this information to the public. VMware also released a few new configuration maximum details on vSphere but for now I am keeping that information to myself. Other audience members in attendance may decide to break this news.
Why does this matter to cloud computing fans, you ask?
VMWare's vCloud vision depends greatly on the upcoming features that expand the scale in which VMWare's core products can operate; expanding beyond the server to the data center as a whole and beyond. Rumors of features such as over-WAN migration of virtual machines in VI4 are key to the vision of federated VMWare-based clouds becoming a reality. So, create a Google Alert for vSphere, sit back and watch the show.
Microsoft detailed on Tuesday its road map and pricing for Web-based software suites built for big companies and growing businesses.
Enabling telecommuting, which many employers and workers increasingly favor, is likely to be a selling point for the productivity and "deskless worker" tools within the Microsoft Online Services lineup.
The move is part of Redmond's push to integrate online and desktop software, shifting much of the heavy lifting to the "cloud."
"Microsoft Online Services is a key component of the software plus services initiative, and we're seeing customers, partners and even competitors embrace this flexible approach to the cloud," Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division, said in a statement.
Details were unveiled Tuesday in Houston at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.
Microsoft's per-user monthly fees for its online business services.
(Credit: Microsoft)For $15 per month per person, the business productivity suite offers an Outlook-integrated Exchange Online for e-mail and calendars, Office SharePoint Online collaboration, messaging via Office Communications Online, and Office Live Meeting video-enabled Web conferencing.
The software giant will charge another $3 per month per user for the Deskless Worker Suite, which combines flavors of SharePoint Online and Exchange Online. The SharePoint portal offers access to internal company sites and search. E-mail, calendars, security filters, and Outlook Web Access Light are included with Exchange Online Deskless Worker.
Microsoft aims to simplify otherwise complex corporate tasks managed by engineers or IT technicians. For instance, a WYSIWYG interface would enable an IT worker to give a new employee access to the company tools in a series of steps that could be shorter than setting up, say, a free Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail account.
One can sign up online to try the beta services.
Exchange Online and Office SharePoint Online remain in beta, with final availability set for sometime in the second half of 2008, when Office Communications Online beta is also due. Microsoft plans for international availability in 2009.
The company offers to pay resellers of its Online Services 12 percent of the price of each contract secured during the first year, and 6 percent per subscription year thereafter. Interested companies can learn more at Microsoft's QuickStart Web site.
Microsoft partners and resellers of Online Services include Accenture, CDW, and Unisys. Nokia is among the companies using the online tools for messaging and collaboration.
Microsoft Online Services includes these tools.
(Credit: Microsoft)Adobe released on Tuesday the first Reader application to bake movies and animation into the Portable Document Format.
With Adobe Reader 9, users can play Flash movies, Shockwave animation, and other rich media content without needing to open a third-party player.
With Reader 9, one click would play a Flash movie embedded in the PDF shown here.
(Credit: CNET Networks)PDFs are reaching new levels of interactivity with this release. Past versions of the nearly ubiquitous and free application, by contrast, have enabled dynamic forms but served largely to open print-ready PDFs.
The update is supposed to load more quickly than version 8, addressing the gripes of many users who felt that Reader slowed down Web surfing.
Adobe has described this release as potentially leading to a one-size-fits-all media player. Acrobat 9, released in June at between $299 to $699, will embed video and animation within PDFs.
Acrobat 9 document-creation software can embed videos and animation as well as custom-developed applications alongside maps that preserve geospatial data, 3D models, images, word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in common formats. The priciest, Pro Extended flavor of Acrobat can convert multiple video formats into Flash.
Security enhancements to the refresh of Acrobat and Reader include support for digital signatures and 256-bit AES encryption.
Adobe's launch of an online word processor and conferencing tool via Acrobat.com in June enables users to comment and collaborate simultaneously on documents, and to convert documents to PDFs.
The Adobe Reader 9 download for Windows and Macs requires at least 128MB of RAM on either a Windows 2000 SP4 or newer system, or an Apple Mac G4 or newer running OS 10.4.11 or higher, respectively.
Microsoft did something that it rarely does last week when it announced availability of its Hyper-V server virtualization technology months ahead of schedule. Unlike Microsoft Virtual Server, which ran as an application, Hyper-V is a true hypervisor capable of hosting multiple instances of Windows and even Suse Linux.
OK, so Microsoft is in the game, but can it compete with server virtualization king VMware? Yup. According to ESG Research, 69 percent of organizations planning to adopt server virtualization are considering Microsoft technology, 59 percent are considering VMware, 10 percent are contemplating XenSource, and 4 percent are kicking the server virtualization tires with Virtual Iron.
Microsoft understands that server virtualization is a strategic IT initiative that has the potential to really disrupt the server-licensing landscape. In other words, server virtualization could take a bite out of Windows sales, if VMware wins in a landslide. Microsoft just won't let that happen.
As Hyper-V gains visibility, my colleague Mark Bowker expects Microsoft to:
- Throw money and programs at its OEMs
Microsoft will use its vast resources to run joint-marketing programs, educate customers, and generate leads with server vendors such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. The goal? Maximize visibility of Hyper-V in a hurry. - Use management as a Hyper-V complement
Microsoft is currently in beta with its System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), a management platform that controls Hyper-V and VMware ESX. As this becomes available, Microsoft can play a low-cost management card to introduce its hypervisor into VMware accounts. - Target the midmarket
VMware is surprisingly strong in the SMB space, along with feisty Virtual Iron. Nevertheless, Microsoft has an army of channel partners and Windows consultants, who should be able to quickly penetrate this Windows-centric market segment.VMware is way too ubiquitous and strong to be "Netscaped," but Microsoft will certainly make the server virtualization space more competitive--in a hurry.
Jon Oltsik is a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group.
I had a very frustrating experience this morning. I decided to start editing an internal team wiki and ran into a significant roadblock: To edit the wiki, I first needed to learn "wikiml." What is wikiml? I'm glad you asked. It's a wiki markup language so that wikis look more like Web pages/documents, and not like a stream of undifferentiated text.
There's just one problem: Wikiml. Who wants to learn a markup language just so you can collaborate with colleagues? It's not that the markup language is particularly difficult (here's a cheat sheet for reference), but requiring the learning of a new language is a step backward, not forward, in terms of ease of use.
Wikis may be more powerful than a Microsoft Word document, but if they're not at least as easy, then they're simply not going to get used. Period. Google gets this: Google Docs is actually easier to use than Microsoft Word.
The Bible has this great counsel in Mark 2:27:
The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
The idea is that Biblical commandments were not designed to inhibit people, but to enable and improve them. Sometimes we let the letter of a law impede the spirit and end up cramping our capabilities. Is there a correlation to software?
... Read MorePamela Jones of Groklaw rightly takes umbrage that Sun Microsystems apparently stood by while The SCO Group attempted to foul the pedigree of Linux, but how much righteous indignation is warranted is debatable. Jones writes:
And what an icky role Sun played, to judge from (Novell's Greg) Jones' description of the agreement. Look at all the damage that resulted from Sun's silence, the litigation that never had to happen....And as far as Linux is concerned, why didn't Sun speak out to help?
It had in the power of its hand the ability to protect Linux users. Silence. For years and years and years. While folks got sued, and the FUD campaign raged on.
Yes, but this overlooks one convenient point: Sun was competing with Linux. Hard. Not only did it not have a legal obligation to speak out, it may well have had a legal obligation to not speak out.
Every contract that I've negotiated in the last few years has, at the customer's or partner's insistence, a section in it that prohibits disclosure of the contract. I would guess that similar wording is to be found in the partnership agreement between Sun and SCO.
Even if Sun had an obligation, legal or otherwise, to disclose Linux's clean bill of health, why would it? We can argue that it may have had a moral obligation, but it also has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders, which arguably wouldn't have been well-served by propping up a competitor, however unfairly maligned.
I'm not suggesting that I personally could have stood by and watched, had I worked for Sun, but I also think it's important not to burden Sun's efforts to remedy some errors of its past with all the good it's doing now. I believe in that pesky repentance thing. :-)
Mosso, the cloud computing division of hosting provider Rackspace, has added a new Web-based control panel and a behind-the-scenes provisioning system to its Hosting Cloud service.
The company said Wednesday the control panel makes it easier for users to set up and manage hosted applications. It includes a new Web-based file manager that gives users access to stored data so that they can create and decompress archives and change access permissions more easily.
The Mosso control panel includes a new Web-based file manager.
A snapshot tool, within the control panel, lets users access and reinstate previous versions of files in the case of accidental overwrite, the company said.
The provisioning system--used to deploy applications--shrinks the time needed to get an application up and running. The company built the new system using Apache's ServiceMix, according to co-founder Todd Morey. "We wrote our initial provisioning system in Java. As we have grown, we started to see some real strain on that system. The new provisioning system is a competitive advantage versus Amazon EC2, for example. We do a lot of the hard work for (the customer)."
Mosso's service, along with a hosted storage offering called CloudFS now in beta testing, competes against services from Amazon and others. Morey says Mosso's selling point versus competitors is that it is easy to set up and run. "Our key differentiator is that we're tightly integrated and easy to use."
The Hosting Cloud service is priced from $100 per month. "You pay for what you use--as you expand, your bandwidth expands," said Morey.
Click here to see more stories from the Structure 08 conference and on cloud computing generally.
A service pack became available Tuesday for CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 illustration and desktop publishing applications.
Corel's updates add support for more than 25 new camera RAW formats. The company also aimed to iron out some graphic design workflows.
"With this service pack for CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4, we have focused on addressing the major feedback provided by our users," said Gerard Metrailler, senior director of Corel's graphics product management.
Users can obtain the updates automatically via the installed software, or by visiting Corel.com. A free trial of the suite is also available.
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 includes CorelDRAW for illustration and page layout, PhotoPaint for photo editing, and PowerTRACE for bitmap-to-vector tracing. The package, considered a competitor to the more expensive Adobe Illustrator and InDesign CS3, works on Windows Vista and XP systems.
Corel also sells the image applications Painter and PaintShop Pro, as well as WordPerfect X4, a competitor to Microsoft Office.
Earlier in June, the Ottawa, Ontario-based company announced an early preview of its Designer Technical Suite X4, which includes CAD 3D and AutoCAD compatibility.
While Marc Benioff may rail against the status quo in the enterprise software business, not all software buyers will join in the chorus, according to one of Benioff's chief competitors.
Web-based business software sold by companies such as Benioff's Salesforce.com will likely augment, not replace, large, complex enterprise systems, SAP Chief Executive Henning Kagermann told The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday.
Kagermann said that while some of the main selling points for Salesforce and other Web-based services make sense--namely, better usability and productivity--corporate buyers are a notoriously conservative bunch.
Kagermann: Big software is here to stay.
(Credit: SAP)A slicker user interface and easier access to corporate applications answer only some of the needs of big business. Security, a uniform data model and corporate-wide compliance with regulatory rules are more pressing for C-level executives, he argues.
Clearly, Henning's argument is biased toward his company's product line. But he may have a point: it's more difficult to manage Web-based systems implemented piecemeal at the departmental level. Regulatory compliance is becoming a corporate nightmare, and companies need all of the help they can get.
Still, much of the real innovation is taking place at companies like Salesforce and Google, as well as at many smaller firms hard at work defining the next wave of cloud-based business software. (Microsoft is making strides here, too).
SAP, for its part, is still struggling with its on-demand strategy.
As Rishi Chandra, product manager for Google Enterprise, said earlier this month, technology innovation is being spurred by the consumer market, which will, in turn, drive demand for better business systems.
Some things never change. For decades, CIOs have been a conservative lot. And for decades, end users have demanded more.
