hyperic

Free Software Foundation President Richard Stallman recently went on a tirade against software as a service (SaaS), suggesting that consumers of SaaS are "putty in the hands of whoever developed that software."

Apparently, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, missed Stallman's memo, because it's advertising for a Salesforce.com developer to help it manage its proprietary (gasp!), SaaS (gasp!) CRM system.

Not that Canonical is alone. Red Hat, Hyperic, MySQL, and other open-source companies also use Salesforce. Are they bad? Are they putty in the hands of Salesforce? Maybe. But they're also companies that need to … Read more

Cisco Systems has always been a highly aggressive acquisition machine, and today's announcement that the company has acquired Jabber makes sense in light of the push toward enterprise collaboration that started with the acquisition of WebEx.

While Cisco made no mention of the fact that Jabber was largely open source, I would assume that's because open source is "accepted" at Cisco. A number of products contain open-source components, and despite some GPL issues in the past, Cisco has contributed to open-source projects.

So, is Cisco the company to consolidate open source, or to just consolidate software … Read more

Roberto Galoppini has a great write-up on Hyperic, a leading open-source systems management company, and its efforts to crack the European market. After seeing 50 percent of its downloads trend toward Europe, Hyperic has begun hiring technical and sales resources to manage its growth there.

It's no surprise to see Hyperic doing so well. Hyperic has long been one of the most prudent open-source companies, managing (and driving) its growth well. Lately it has been delivering things like CloudStatus to help companies monitor their cloud-based computing resources. (As a testament to how good it is, Hyperic was the first … Read more

One of the nice advantages of server virtualization is the ability to run Linux and Windows on the same server. One of the headaches, though, is getting help when something goes wrong.

Microsoft and Novell on Thursday said they are going to try to make things a little easier. The pair announced that they will jointly support a virtualization scenario in which Suse Linux is running as a guest operating system under Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization.

The companies said partners such as Dell will test the setup at the joint lab the two companies have in Cambridge, Mass. It's … Read more

Mr. Virtualization (aka ESG analyst Mark Bowker) called me Monday from the big Microsoft virtualization gala. From his description it was vintage Microsoft: company senior managers, partners, demos, and multimedia presentations. I kind of wish I was there for the demonstration of Buddy Guy's virtual guitar playing on a Gibson Flying V. (You had to be there.)

Microsoft's Bobs (Kelly and Muglia) kicked off the day with keynote presentations around customer case studies and Microsoft's technology vision. But what's most interesting to me is what Microsoft didn't say. According to Bowker, Microsoft hardly mentioned its recently released hypervisor (Hyper-V). … Read more

Microsoft said on Monday that it now plans to offer its server virtualization product for free.

Ahead of a virtualization event in Redmond, Wash., Microsoft said that its Hyper-V Server 2008 will be released within 30 days and be available at no cost via the Web. The software maker had planned to charge $28 for the product.

Also on Monday, Microsoft plans to show off a live migration feature that will be part of the next version of its Hyper-V virtualization technology. Live migration allows companies to move a running virtual machine from one server to another.

The feature will … Read more

When Hyperic launched CloudStatus.com, I think most people took a look and figured they would never need such a service. Then all of the sudden we saw multiple outages from Google and Amazon and CloudStatus.com became the best resource to figure out what was going on.

I asked Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic to provide some insight as to why the Cloud is as much of an operations as it is a deployment battle.

Guest post by Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic Operations is one of the key open issues that will define Cloud computing's future.

The separation of Cloud offerings around consumption of resources versus consumption of applications makes a lot of sense. Regardless of the use case, the idea that a business might choose the Cloud as a platform to build and consume applications because it inherently reduces or removes the operational burden is ridiculous.

The simple reason is that software, regardless of who is developing it, always fails. Those who refute that point haven't been around technology long enough or haven't paid attention to the fact that every single 'Cloud' has had outages recently.

Enterprise software consumers (the folks whose money most Cloud providers are looking to get) know better than to assume that any new platform (whether it's "the Cloud" or Linux or Java) is inherently management free. Because of this, I'm confident that until management technology (including everything from provisioning to monitoring) matures, the enterprise will still regard the Cloud as a place to do science experiments. … Read more

Most musicians want to concentrate on writing, performing, and recording. The first two are like breathing and eating, and the third has become much easier in the last decade thanks to the ongoing revolution in digital technology--you can set up a decent computer-based recording studio for a few thousand bucks. But once you're done recording, then what? For artists without a record label, promotion and distribution are two of the thorniest tasks--they take a lot of time, and you learn a lot of lessons (and meet a lot of rip-off artists) in the process.

Launched today, HyperDIY attempts to … Read more

There are certain things that open-source and Software as a Service (SaaS) companies increasingly need, and which a new crop of vendors is rising to provide.

On the one hand, as JasperSoft's recent outsourcing of its forge software demonstrates, open-source companies need a place in which they can engage their community. (SaaS companies like Salesforce.com are increasingly doing the same thing, e.g., AppExchange.)

But subscription-based vendors also need subscription management tools (e.g., OCS), as well as "networks" to deliver updates, add-ons, and more, such as Bitrock is providing.

We're at the early, formative … Read more