Latest News from Maureen O'Gara

Eucalyptus’ Cloud Platform Hits First Update

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:30:00 EST

The new widgetry features multi-cluster support and enhanced concurrency management to improve scaling so users can seamlessly overlay their Eucalyptus cloud on top of virtually any existing IT infrastructure, regardless of size or configuration. Eucalyptus is meant for implementing an on-premise cloud using an organization’s own IT infrastructure. It supports the same APIs as public clouds, and with the release of version 1.6.1, claims to be the only on-premise cloud platform that’s fully compatible with the Amazon AWS public cloud infrastructure.

EC Objects to Oracle-Sun; Oracle Vows To Fight

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:30:00 EST

The European Commission Monday served Oracle and Sun with a statement of objections (SO) that takes exception to their $7.4 billion combination. Sun immediately told the SEC that "The Statement of Objections sets out the Commission's preliminary assessment regarding, and is limited to, the combination of Sun's open source MySQL database product with Oracle's enterprise database products and its potential negative effects on competition in the market for database products."

VMware Takes Another Whack at Desktop Virtualization

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:15:00 EST

VMware figures to push virtualization onto more desktops with the release next week of its next-generation View 4.0, advertised as the only purpose-built desktop virtualization solution in the industry. The gussied-up vSphere-based widgetry, a gateway to the desktop as a managed service, is supposed to overcome the barriers of user experience, cost and scale that have so far limited the adoption of desktop virtualization to what VMware calls a “small niche group of industries.” VMware claims View’s performance will match the most demanding environment while reducing desktop TCO by as much as 50%.

Sun Revenues Drop 25%

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST

Poor beaten-up Sun Microsystems confided the financial results of its September quarter to the SEC on Friday and they weren’t pretty. Sun was supposed to be part of Oracle by now and not washing its linen in public anymore but the European Commission hasn’t sanctioned the union, and isn’t expected to now unless Oracle does something about Sun property MySQL. What the EC wants exactly isn’t clear.

Microsoft Cuts Broad Cloud Pact with Taiwan’s No. 1 Teleco

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST

Microsoft has cut a broad cloud alliance with Taiwan’s number one telecom company, the erstwhile state-owned Chunghwa Telecom Co. Ltd. (CHT). The pair Monday signed a memorandum of understanding to develop software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud applications and services using Windows Azure and other Microsoft widgetry.

Microsoft Cloud Center Set for Taiwan

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:15:00 EST

Microsoft and the government of Taiwan are going to set up a cloud research center before the end of the year. It should help local contract manufacturers develop cloud devices and services. Quanta, for instance, intends to start churning out cloud servers at some point. Microsoft means to spend $9.5 billion in 2010 and a lot of it is earmarked for the cloud.

Intel Market Share Up a Snip

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:45:00 EST

This may not be the best time to mention this – given New York’s antitrust suit – but Intel’s share of PC processors was up marginally year-over-year in Q3 from 81.2% to 81.5% according to Mercury Research and AMD gained a tenth of point year-over-year to 17.8%, but lost 0.7% sequentially. Between the two of them they’ve got 99.3% of the market.

Carly Throws Her Hat in the Ring

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:30:00 EST

Carly Fiorina, HP’s ousted CEO, has formally made herself a candidate to run for the U.S. Senate on the Republican ticket seeking to dethrone three-term Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer on the strength of her business background. Actually HP has done quite well with her acquisition of Compaq. Now she’s got to make it through the primaries and emerge as the Republican Party’s nominee.

More Microsoft Layoffs

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:45:00 EST

Microsoft, which announced its very first mass layoffs even in January, canning 5,000 people, is on to a second round of 800 cuts to adjust to economic conditions. The company said they were 25% at home, the rest worldwide and did not identify any particular unit or job category. A spokesman told the AP most of the first 5,000 have been let go. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer isn’t changing his story about IT spending not coming back any time soon, maybe never. “We will see growth,” he said, “We will not see recovery.”

Hitachi Gets Serious About Linux

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:15:00 EST

Hitachi has joined Red Hat’s year-old Advanced Mission-Critical Program and offer high-end to mission-critical workloads on Linux to customers in Japan. The program is meant to mimic the kind of workloads, services levels, support and long lifecycles previously thought to be supported only on more expensive legacy platforms and should reduce customer costs. Its expanded support options include a 10-year lifecycle, the ability to standardize on a single update release for up to 18 months and proactive notification to reduce system disruption.

Skytap Claims Real-Time Collaboration in the Cloud

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:01:00 EST

Skytap today will start dangling the chance to collaborate over the web using cloud-based virtual data centers (VDCs), something Amazon, say, can’t do, certainly not with the flick of a single URL. Like SharePoint and WebEx enable teams to collaborate on documents, Skytap is supposed to let teams collaborate in complex IT environments to deliver business initiatives faster and more predictably.

Likewise Wants To Move the Moochers

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:45:00 EST

Likewise, which authenticates Linux, Unix and Mac users with Microsoft Active Directory, has started offering three starter packs that combine its Enterprise software with support and training services. They are designed to move customers from the company’s open source software to Likewise Enterprise. Likewise Enterprise controls access to applications and data, centrally manages settings with group policies and creates reports for regulatory audits. It’s also the only solution to provide 100% native support for Apple’s Workgroup Manager application.

Yahoo Open Sources Traffic Server Code

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST

It says Traffic Server enables the session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing and routing of an entire cloud computing stack. It’s supposed to offer fast, reliable and scalable access to cached online content and speed responses to requests for stored web objects, such as files, news articles or images, reducing bandwidth usage and costs.

Red Hat Virtualization for Servers Goes GA

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST

The company says “extensive collaboration with large enterprise beta customers, such as Comviva, Host Europe, NTT Communications, Qualcomm and Swisscom, resulted in enhanced product capabilities designed to meet enterprise requirements for deploying and managing heterogeneous virtualization and cloud environments.” It didn’t say what exactly. The widgetry includes a standalone, lightweight, secure, high-performance KVM hypervisor designed to host Linux and Windows virtual servers and desktops whose memory-sharing technology reportedly permits more efficient guest consolidation and enterprise features such as live migration.

Zend Cozies Up to Oracle

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST

Zend Technology, Microsoft’s little open source PHP friend, says it’s making its Zend application server, designed for running and managing business-critical PHP applications in production, available to Oracle’s enterprise customers through Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux Network. It includes out-of-the-box enterprise-grade connectivity to Oracle Database. PHP is said to run 35% of the web. According Zend CEO Andi Gutmans, “Together, we are now delivering an enterprise-grade PHP stack from top to bottom supporting the development, deployment, and management of business-critical PHP applications on Oracle. This full stack will also ease deployment in virtual environments using Oracle VM.”

Parallels Makes It Harder To Tell a Windows from a Mac App

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST

It claims the widgetry, which lets Mac users run Windows and Linux alongside Mac OS X, is faster, smarter, easier and more powerful than previous generations. Unlike Apple’s own Boot Camp, which forces people to reboot between operating systems, Parallels users can switch between Mac and Windows seamlessly because of virtualization.

Economy Beginning To Accelerate: Cisco CEO

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

Cisco CEO John Chambers, who has turned into something of an economic oracle probably because he is more in command of his catbird seat than most big-time CEOs, said Wednesday when Cisco reported its quarterly results that the economy hit a “clear tipping point” before mid-summer and is now accelerating worldwide, enough for Cisco itself to start cautiously spending again. He’s planning targeted hiring.

Browser Underdogs Want Ballot Screen Changes

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

Microsoft’s browser rivals aren’t satisfied with the tentative “ballot screen” settlement that the company came to with the European Commission, which would offer all its European users a chance to download a rival browser. Google, Mozilla and Opera want changes made. According to the New York Times, Mozilla doesn’t like the idea of the top five browsers by market share in Europe would appear in a row alphabetically from left to right. That would put Apple’s Safari first. Mozilla doesn’t think that’s fair on the theory it would give Safari – not your first thought for an Internet Explorer substitute – an advantage; it wants them to appear randomly.

Big Data Kills 30-Year-Old Market

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:20:00 EST

According to Aster Data, applications need to go to “Big Data,” not the other way around. And to do that the company’s got a massively parallel data-application server that can embed applications inside a massively scalable MPP data warehouse and analyze petabytes of data – or terabytes, if that’s all you’ve got – ultra-fast. Apps are automatically parallelized for scale; users can take their existing Java, C, C++, C#, .NET, Perl and Python applications, MapReduce-enable them and push them down into the data.

Google Open Sources its JavaScript Tools

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST

Google Thursday open sourced its Closure JavaScript tools – a compiler, a cross-browser, server-agnostic library and a bunch of precompiled templates – in the name of making web apps easier to build. Recall that Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps are JavaScript-intensive applications. Well, Google says the Closure widgetry is a key part of the JavaScript infrastructure behind its web apps. And the more web apps, the more of a headache for Microsoft and its ilk.

IBM Betas Test & Dev Cloud

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:30:00 EST

It’s called plainly enough IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud and will provide compute and storage as a service with Rational Software Delivery Services, WebSphere middleware and Information Management database thrown in.

14 More Charged in Insider Trading Scandal

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:30:00 EST

An SEC lawyer told a federal court yesterday that more people could be charged in the insider trading scandal that has so far brought down senior IBM executive Robert Moffat and former AMD CEO Hector Ruiz and as good as her word 14 more were charged Thursday morning with conspiracy to defraud, engaging in fraudulent activities and making untrue statements. Those arrested include an analyst for Moody’s and an M&A attorney with Ropes & Gray, the law firm that advised 3Com and Avaya when they were acquired by private equity houses. Those stocks have now been added to the expanding list of tech stocks that were allegedly traded based on insider information. That list now includes AMD, Sun, Intel, IBM, Google, Akamai, Atheros and Kronos. Zvi Goffer, one of the former Galleon employees picked up on Thursday reportedly supplied tipsters with pre-paid cell phones to avoid detection by investigators and paid them in cash. Galleon CEO Raj Rajaratnam is supposed to be the kingpin behind mischief. Besides Moffat, an executive at Intel and another at McKinsey were among the six people previously charged. The government claims the latest round of charges represents illegal gains of $20 million on top of the $20 million allegedly in the first set of indictments. Out of the 20 people charged so far, five have pleaded guilty.

New York Sues Intel for Antitrust

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:45:00 EST

New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Intel Wednesday charging it with engaging in a “worldwide, systematic campaign of illegal conduct – revealed in e-mails – to maintain its monopoly power and prices on its microprocessors.” The colorful suit accuses Intel of using “bribery and coercion to maintain a stranglehold on the market.”

EC to Object to Oracle + Sun: FT

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:45:00 EST

The European Commission is about to object formally to Oracle’s multibillion-dollar acquisition of Sun because Oracle is hanging tough and refusing to make any concessions concerning the open source database MySQL, a potential Oracle rival as the EC sees it, according to the Financial Times. The paper says a statement of objection (SO) could be issued in the next few days unless one side or the other blinks.

3Leaf Makes x86 Boxes into SMP Cloudware

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:30:00 EST

3Leaf Systems, the well-funded start-up, dropped its fig leaf Tuesday and took a running jump into the pools of memory, I/O and cache that it can construct and deconstruct at will based on the application, creating scale-up shared-memory SMP systems the likes of mainframes, proprietary mid-range machines and pricey RISC-based Unix boxes out of racks of cheap and dirty two-socket scale-out x64 systems.

Cisco, EMC, VMware & Intel Form Acadia JV

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:15:00 EST

Cisco and EMC Tuesday kicked off a cloud-chasing joint venture called Acadia that includes VMware and Intel as minority investors. Presumably they took the name from the ancient Greeks who used the word to mean a refuge or idyllic place and not the uprooted and deported North American Acadia captured in Longfellow's magnificent tear-jerker "Evangeline," although Cisco's new enemies IBM and HP may try to persuade users that it is.

Cisco, EMC, VMware in Cloud Venture

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:15:00 EST

Sometime before 4:30 Wednesday afternoon New York time Cisco and EMC, two companies that are already tight and were expected to get tighter, are supposed to announce a joint venture to sell a cloud or cloud products called vBlock. VMware's involved because virtualization is relatively standard cloud fare, it's majority owned by EMC and it's already Cisco's BFF but its level of participation in the venture is unclear despite all the whispering going on. It could be a full member. Based on broad hints from the companies, the Wall Street Journal got wind of the joint venture in September and said it was code named Alpine.

Ruiz Out in Insider Trading Scandal

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

Former AMD CEO Hector Ruiz, the guy who spun out AMD’s plants into a joint venture with the government of Abu Dhabi and then became chairman of that company when it was formed in March, has stepped down after being identified as one of the tipsters leaking material inside information to hedge funds that traded on it.

RightScale Gets More Portable

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:15:00 EST

Young as it is, RightScale, the cloud manager, is on to its next-generation platform. Its ServerTemplate widgetry will now automatically configure servers on specific clouds, system architectures and operating systems, something it didn’t do before. It should let users take advantage of the specific features and functionality offered by each cloud provider, beginning with Amazon and Rackspace, while retaining portability.

Canonical Offers Free Cloudware

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:45:00 EDT

Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition, code named Karmic Koala, became generally available for free download Thursday. That’s the stuff that introduces Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), a k a Eucalyptus Software’s open source software, as a fully supported technology. The widgetry is based on the same APIs as Amazon EC2 and, as previously reported, lets businesses build private clouds.

LA to Go with Google Apps on Condition . . .

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:45:00 EDT

The city of Los Angeles has okayed a $7.2 million deal with CSC to rip out a lot of its existing Novell GroupWise e-mail systems and whatnot and replace it with Google Apps provided CSC agrees to pay a pre-set penalty if there’s a security breach. They still need to dicker about that according to the AP.

Zeus to Manage the Cloud

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EDT

Zeus Technology, the Anglo-American concern whose web server ran 3% of the world’s web sites back before the dot.com bubble burst, third in the race behind Apache and Microsoft, was asking around among CIOs, IT director and senior IT managers at large organizations and came to find out that although 75% of them, give or take, are either in the cloud or soon will be, only 27% have a solution in place to manage it and so are basically flying without a net.

VMware’s Fusion 3 Stumbles at the Gate

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 08:45:00 EDT

Fusion 3, VMware’s upgraded solution for running Windows and PC applications on a Mac, although Apple has its own Bootcamp widgetry, tried wending its way out the other day and hit a nasty snag at its upgrade portal. VMware says it was because of larger-than-expected demand and couldn’t keep up. The problem is reportedly fixed now.

‘The Crash is Behind Us’: Peddie

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:00:00 EDT

Third-quarter shipments of graphics processors were up 21.2% sequentially and Q2 was a strong quarter so graphics maven Jon Peddie feels safe in predicting a Merry Christmas for PCs and the industry. AMD showed the biggest jump in quarter-to-quarter growth at 30% followed by Intel at 21%. Intel shipped the most parts at 63 million, over twice as many as its nearest competitor Nvidia. "A total of 119.45 million units were shipped in the third quarter, exceeding the record 111 million units that shipped in Q3 2008," Peddie said. "The crash of fall 2008 is now behind us."

IBM Fires Exec Implicated in Insider Trading Scandal

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:15:00 EDT

IBM has cut its ties with Robert Moffat, the senior VP who ran its server, storage and chips businesses and was arrested two weeks ago for allegedly whispering insider information on IBM and Sun financial results as well as AMD's reorganization plans to hedge funds that traded on the material information. IBM isn't saying much, not even that Moffat was fired, merely that he is no longer an IBM employee.

IBM Fails to Stop Its M&A Chief from Working at Dell

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:30:00 EDT

A New York appeals court said the other day that David Johnson, the ex-IBM M&A chief poached by Dell in May and sued by IBM to make him honor his non-compete – which he intentionally signed in the wrong place to get out from under – can work for Dell. The courts weren’t happy with IBM. The district court that was asked for an injunction called IBM’s tactics “vexatious” and “a great disservice to the interests of Mr. Johnson and of the court in the orderly conduct of this litigation.”

Microsoft Nudges Eclipse Developers to Windows-Ware

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:00:00 EDT

Microsoft was in one of its interoperability moods Wednesday and said that developers using Eclipse, the great open source IDE, will be able to target Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, its Azure cloud operating system and Silverlight. This renewed open source invasion – Microsoft’s no stranger to Eclipse although it’s not a member – is being spearheaded by two open source allies of Microsoft: Canada’s Tasktop Technologies for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and France’s Soyatec for Azure and Silverlight. Tasktop’s CEO, by the way, created Eclipse’s Mylyn project.

Chrome Sued for Patent Infringement

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:45:00 EDT

An Israeli company called Red Bend has sued Google’s Chrome browser for patent infringement in the district court in Massachusetts. It says Chrome’s Courgette differential compression algorithm treads on its widgetry. Courgette, which launched in July, sends just partial application updates to the browser to save on bandwidth and reduce vulnerabilities.

Juniper’s Out Gunning for Cisco

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:30:00 EDT

With IBM and Dell watching its back, Juniper strode into town Thursday like a gunslinger twirling its pearl-handled six-guns around ready to take on Cisco, the fastest gun in the West, and all the other network hombres. The mid-sized company opened its barrage at the New York Stock Exchange, a new Juniper customer, on the 40th anniversary of ARPAnet.

Start-up Makes Office Share

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:45:00 EDT

DocVerse, a start-up set up by a couple of old Microsoft hands two years ago, has begun commercializing its downloadable plug-in said to turn Microsoft’s Word, PowerPoint and Excel into full-fledged web-based collaboration tools. The widgetry, some of it still in development when the first piece went to beta in February, is supposed to make any .doc, .ppt, or .xls file into a secure web document that can be shared and edited by multiple users anytime, anywhere, online or off.

Oracle+MySQL Opponents Take to the Barricades

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:45:00 EDT

Monty Widenius, the creator of the MySQL open source database – which is apparently all that stands between Oracle and its acquisition of Sun – thinks that Oracle shouldn’t have his baby and that the European Commission – whose investigation into MySQL has put the Oracle-Sun merger in limbo – should force Oracle to spit it out to another company.

Citrix Regroups on XenDesktop Licensing

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:15:00 EDT

Citrix got push-back on its newfangled two-week-old VDI+XenApp kit, XenDesktop 4 – which it meant to license only by named users not concurrent users – so Tuesday it materialized a new device-based licensing option, a new VDI Edition for both user/device and CCU licensing and a new campus-wide licensing program for schools.

Zend Server Gets a Plane-like ‘Black Box’

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:45:00 EDT

Zend Technologies, the PHP company, has hung Zend Server 5.0, which support IBM i as well as Linux and Windows, out for public beta. A production release should be out by the end of the year. The widgetry is a major new version of the company’s enterprise-ready PHP application server, including Code Tracing, which is supposed to slash problem resolution time by up to 50%.

Novell Denied Stay in SCO Trial

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:30:00 EDT

SCO may yet get to drag Novell kicking, screaming and clutching at the doorpost in front of a jury to decide who really owns Unix. In the first and only head-snapping legal decision in all the years SCO has been in court, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver denied the bid Novell made Tuesday for a 90-day stay in going to trial back in Utah so it can appeal to the Supreme Court.

Ex-AMD CEO, Like Top IBM Guy, Source of Insider Information: Reports

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:45:00 EDT

Hector Ruiz, then CEO of AMD, was the unidentified source of material information that the busted Galleon ring traded on, according to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. He’s even higher up the totem pole than Robert Moffat, the head of IBM servers and storage who was arrested and charged on October 16 along with five other co-conspirators in what the government called the biggest case of insider trading involving a hedge fund in history

Cisco Buys Cloud-Based Security Company

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:45:00 EDT

Cisco’s appetite needed feeding again so it’s buying ScanSafe Inc, the 10-year-old software-as-a-service (SaaS) web security house, for $183 million in cash and retention-based incentives. It’s already got on-premise content security provider IronPort and is supposed to bring together IronPort’s high-performance web security appliance and ScanSafe’s widgetry, which blocks malware and secures the use of the web and messaging.

Amazon Cuts Prices

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:17:00 EDT

With Windows Azure just around the corner, Amazon figured it was time to blink and cut prices on its core EC2 cloud services. Starting November 1 all Linux-based on-demand EC2 compute instances will cost 15% than they have. That means, it say, that, say, a Small Standard Linux-based instance will run 8.5 cents an hour of computing, not the current price of 10 cents an hour.

Adobe & Salesforce Cut Cloud Deal

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:00:00 EDT

Adobe in a strategic deal with Salesforce.com has put out a jointly developed, Eclipse-based Flash Builder for Force.com IDE - well, at least a developer preview - integrating their two platforms in the name of greater developer productivity in creating what they claim will be a "new generation" of rich Internet applications (RIAs) in the cloud - and some mumble about bringing the richness of the consumer web to enterprise cloud apps. Final delivery isn't scheduled until sometime in the first half of 2010. Meantime, see http://developer.force.com/flashbuilder where it warns against using the widgetry, which includes a beta version of Flash Builder 4 Premium, to build for production applications. No notion of pricing yet.

‘Tipper A’ Had Her Fingers in the Intel Cookie Jar Before

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:00:00 EDT

Turns out one of the government's key witnesses in its insider trading case against the Galleon Group hedge fund - the one that's brought down a senior IBM executive a heartbeat or two away from IBM's CEO - used to be employed by Intel and was charged in 2001 in a sealed criminal complaint with wire fraud for sending material information about Intel's financials to Galleon according to a story by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the San Joe Mercury News. Roomy Khan has been identified by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times as the "confidential" informant the SEC calls "Tipper A" in its current suit against billionaire Galleon CEO Raj Rajaratnam and his five confederates, including Robert Moffat, the guy who ran IBM's $19-billion-a-year server and storage unit until last week. It's supposed to be the largest case of insider trading involving a hedge fund ever brought to light.

Tilera’s 100 Cores Aimed at Cloud Disruption

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:15:00 EDT

Tilera, the start-up building high-performance multi-core processors that aren’t x86, laid out a roadmap Monday that will see it sampling a single processor with a hundred RISC-based cores in the first quarter of 2011 and producing the widgets a few months later. Imagine that, 100 cores. The company believes the widget, called the TILE-Gx100, will be the world’s first general-purpose 100-core processor and says it will be adopted by major service providers, potentially folks like Facebook and maybe Google – although Google’s always the odd fish – for cloud infrastructure, dislocating the standard Intel-based cloud.