Disruptors

Rackspace goes open source with cloud platform

Data center and cloud infrastructure service provider Rackspace is expected to announce Monday the release of a new open-source offering that will allow users to build and launch their own internal and hosted clouds.

Dubbed OpenStack, the new Apache-licensed project will feature several cloud infrastructure components, including a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files, the company's highly scalable storage engine.

In addition to the initial offering, a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula cloud technology and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology is expected to be available later this year.

Rackspace has been hosting enterprise computing … Read more

Report: Java and MySQL doing fine under Oracle

A new developer survey report from open-source business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft shows that there has been minimal fallout from Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, and that Java and MySQL seem to be doing just fine in their new home.

These results contrast with the latest developments of the OpenSolaris project, which, under Oracle's watch, has seen its Governing Board threatening to disband.

MySQL and Java have a strong presence in modern open-source software stacks, both in the enterprise and in Web shops. Interestingly, the survey report suggests that, thanks to Oracle's commitment to Java, as part of … Read more

Want venture capital? Come to California

Despite the fact that the state is constantly teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, California remains at the top of the venture capital heap churning out the most deals with the most dollar volume in the second quarter of 2010.

A new report from private company research firm CB Insights reveals that California companies took more than 50 percent of total venture dollars in the second quarter with financings breaking the $3 billion funding mark and more than half of those funds going toward health care and Internet companies. In addition to California, two other states--Massachusetts and New York--accounted for … Read more

Nintendo chief on gaming and the cloud

I was in Japan last week for a number of meetings related to brand development and disruptive software and found myself less intrigued by the overwhelming array of Japanese mobile phones and more interested in the handheld game consoles from Nintendo and others.

It's not that there aren't a plethora of mobile phones that have all kinds of cool features, but that since generally those phones can't be used in the U.S. (and most don't offer English interfaces) the game consoles became a lot more interesting.

One of the news items I was late to … Read more

Ricoh gears up cloud storage for iPhone

Ricoh, the Japanese digital office solutions company, is announcing a new iPhone app from its Quanp subsidiary. The app provides 10GB of free cloud-based storage, the ability to share files up to 500MB, uploading and management of photos and videos taken on an iPhone, and a potentially cool local sharing function with other nearby iPhone users.

The Quanp app rose to No. 2 on the Japanese App Store in the Productivity category after its release in Japan earlier this month. It's now available in the App Store for users in the U.S.

There are a vast array of choices for cloud storage, including a number of products that address the need to manage files from a mobile device. One interesting angle of the Quanp product is a function called "Flick File," which allows you to send files back and forth via Bluetooth. It reminds me of the old days of beaming business cards to Palm devices, or more recently of the Bump social-networking application.

I've been watching Ricoh's Quanp organization work its way through the ins and outs of Silicon Valley for the past year and a half. Their online storage service--they call it "visual" online storage due to the fancy 3D interface of their PC client--has potential to help handle the deluge of data we are creating at home.

The vast majority of computer users don't have great backup habits, and with more and more people embracing mobile devices and data usage rates on smartphones skyrocketing, the lack of backups is only going to get worse. With cloud-based storage that can sync with a PC, much of the hassle is removed from the backup equation.

In Japan, mobile phones are ubiquitous: people use them to enter subways with a quick swipe, to pay for things in vending machines, and to manage paperless boarding passes in airports. Japanese conglomerate Sharp leads in cell phone market share with 26.2 percent, and Apple has the largest American corporate presence with 4.9 percent. … Read more

Cloudera goes enterprise with new Hadoop offering

Cloudera, a provider of support and services around the open-source cloud platform Apache Hadoop, on Tuesday announced Cloudera Enterprise, a suite of subscription-only add-ons to its free distribution.

The core platform, called Cloudera's Distribution for Hadoop (or CDH for short), was first unveiled in March 2009 and is 100 percent open-source software. Now, the company is offering Cloudera Enterprise, a suite of additional tools for monitoring, managing, and administering a cluster in production to complement the core CDH platform--for a fee.

This business model fits into the open-core category, where companies charge for exclusive tools or functions on top … Read more

The power of pull in the clouds

The tech industry is moving from push to pull, author John Hagel III says.

Hagel, chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge and co-author of "The Only Sustainable Edge" and "The Power of Pull," spoke with me Thursday at the Structure 2010 conference in San Francisco about how IT needs to change in the age of the cloud and the potential of moving from push to pull in business processes.

Hagel's latest book, "The Power of Pull," is co-authored by John Seely Brown and Lang Davison and is focused on how to address the most pressing challenges in a rapidly changing, increasingly interdependent world.

According to Hagel, "pull" starts with a broad business issue: for example, looking at long-term changes in a business environment to show how well a company is doing over a period of time. According to Hagel's research, some metrics, such as return on assets, have shown that there are statistical issues--both legitimate and anomalous--that raise all kind of questions and show that not enough companies look for long-term sustainability.

With far less predictability and stability in markets and in business, "pull" has become more relevant than "push." There is a disconnect between management practices and the way the world has changed.

Hagel outlines three stages of how we're moving from push to pull:

Access--being able to get the resources you need. This is an area already being addressed by Google and other search engines that provide answers to queries. Attraction--you don't know what to look for, but there is opportunity to increase unexpected encounters. In this case, the goal is to find inadvertent patterns or dynamics that can then be reacted to. Full potential--ultimately, this newly discovered knowledge leads to performance improvement.

Cloud-based systems and services are an entry point to exploit the full potential of the vast amount of data that is always in play, but they tend to be stuck on the edge of organizations and practices, while the core of the process still needs to be addressed.… Read more

IBM chief scientist seeks patterns in patterns

Despite what is often considered to be a conservative approach to business, IBM has no shortage of big thinkers who use their skills both internally and externally to influence the way the company thinks about technology and how it applies to business processes.

This week I met with Jeff Jonas, chief scientist, IBM Entity Analytics, to talk about how predictive analytics is moving into new realms of big data and how companies are using software to deal with the deluge of information.

Jonas joined IBM in 2005 when Big Blue acquired SRD, a company he founded to develop so-called extraordinary systems with specific data analysis tasks, such as facial recognition and analysis systems casinos use to catch cheating gamblers.

The main thrust of Jonas' research right now is trying to figure out ways to better take advantage of as much data as possible as fast as the transaction is happening--with an eye toward real-time predictive analytics. This is basically pattern detection in real-time, based on patterns that may or may not exist already.

Jonas explained that you may not know of a pattern, but you want to find one, and that many might be interesting but they don't always matter. In the casino example, bad guys are looking to perform channel separation by mixing and matching, people, places, and things, but the casino needs to do channel consolidation to aggregate information and determine an immediate course of action.… Read more

Adobe releasing Puppet code for managing Hadoop

Puppet Labs announced on Thursday that Adobe Systems is publishing code for managing Hadoop on the Puppet Forge community development site. (Disclosure: I am an adviser to Puppet Labs.)

Puppet is an open-source data center automation and configuration management framework aiming to provide system administrators a platform for consistent, transparent, and flexible systems management.

The necessity of data center automation and management tools (often grouped into the DevOps category) is becoming ever more apparent, as cloud principles and large-scale systems that process data in a parallel manner continue to emerge.

Case in point: Hadoop is an open-source platform powering hugely … Read more