Articles by Maureen O'Gara

Amazon EC2 To Add Windows

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:30:00 EDT

Amazon said Wednesday that its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), currently limited to various Unix and Linux operating systems, will start supporting Windows Server and SQL Server sometime this fall, describing it as "one of our most requested features." It's currently running a private beta of the widgetry.

SAP Takes Sales Hit, Blames Credit Crisis

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:45:00 EDT

Mid-morning Monday SAP confessed that the bottom suddenly fell out of its sales in the last two weeks of September as the economy tanked and the company found it increasingly hard to sign contracts. CEO Henning Kagermann blamed liquidity and financing issues especially at mid-sized companies – but did not identify problem geographies – and said that SAP’s Q3 numbers will be below expectations.

Silverlight 2 Reportedly on the Horizon

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:00:00 EDT

Silverlight 2 advanced to Release Candidate 0 over the weekend. Microsoft underscores that it is only for testing and “should not be used for launching Silverlight 2 applications for the general public.” But final release, covering Windows and Mac, is thought to be imminent.

AMD's Virtualization Play - Shanghai Due After Istanbul

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:00:00 EDT

AMD’s first 45nm chip, the Shanghai version of its quad-core Barcelona server processor, is reportedly in full production. The company has reportedly pulled in delivery of two-way and eight-way models from Q1 to any minute now. Shanghai evidently means a 20% improvement over Barcelona at the same frequencies and a performance-enhancing increase in cache size to 6MB. It only supports HyperTransport 1.0 however.

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit to Ship with Open Source jQuery

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 03:00:00 EDT

Microsoft said, “Going forward we’ll use jQuery as one of the libraries used to implement higher-level controls in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, as well as to implement new AJAX server-side helper methods for ASP.NET MVC. New features we add to ASP.NET AJAX (like the new client template support) will be designed to integrate nicely with jQuery as well.”

Google-Yahoo Deal Put on Hold

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 07:15:00 EDT

Yahoo’s life-saving revenue-enhancing alliance with Google, supposedly set to kick off in a week and substitute for a Microsoft buy-out, has been put on hold while antitrust regulators at the Department of Justice continue their investigation. The companies issued separate statements late Friday saying they had agreed to a "brief delay in implementing the agreement."

"OK, Boys, Cloud Computing Is the Plan" - Steve Ballmer

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:00:00 EDT

With Microsoft mandarin Kevin Johnson bolting to Jupiter, leaving Microsoft to lick its wounds over Yahoo and reorganize, CEO Steve Ballmer sent out an all-hands e-mail to Microsoft folk encapsulating the message he delivered to financial analysts gathering in Redmond Thursday. Ballmer highlighted software-plus-service, associating it with a 'platform in the cloud and delivering applications across PCs, phones, TVs, and other devices, at work and in the home' (Microsoft's Mesh widgetry) and promised 'more about our cloud platform initiatives and the next versions of our Live and Online technologies' at the company?s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) at the end of October.

Microsoft to Enable Cloud Computing Through Rosario

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 15:30:00 EDT

Presumably still months before rollout – there’s no date yet – Microsoft started talking up the next version of its developer tools and platform, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0, Monday describing them as enabling cloud computing and democratizing application lifecycle management (ALM). The “democratizing” Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010, code-named Rosario, is supposed to bring all the members of a development organization – from the core developers and testers to the wider team of project managers, designers and business analysts – into the application development lifecycle and remove many of the existing barriers to integration.

Microsoft's Hyper-V Released

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 09:45:00 EDT

Let the games begin. First thing this morning Microsoft said that its standalone Hyper-V Server 2008, the bare metal hypervisor meant to help it wrest leadership of the virtualization market from VMware, would be available today. Anticipating Microsoft’s coming, VMware declared its standalone hypervisor a commodity a couple of months ago and – in a market broadening play – cut the $495-$1,090 price to free. Microsoft, which was only supposed to charge a nominal 28 bucks a head for its like-minded widgetry, followed suit a few weeks later.

Microsoft’s in the Market for European Search Engineers

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 05:00:00 EDT

As should come as no surprise, Microsoft is going to build an enterprise search R&D center in Norway around its Fast Search & Transfer acquisition. It says it will add 50 R&D workers to Fast’s 300 employees. It will be Microsoft’s third R&D center in Europe and part of Microsoft’s post-Yahoo strategy. It’s also planning to open a new European Search Technology Center (STC) with arms in Paris, London and Munich under Jordi Ribas, who until a minute ago was general manager of its Conncted TV business group.

Red Hat Delivers Integrated Linux-based HPC Platform

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:00:00 EDT

Red Hat Thursday delivered what it called the industry’s first integrated Linux-based High Performance Computing (HPC) platform, otherwise known as the Red Hat HPC Solution, an all-in-one HPC cluster stack that Red Hat and Platform Computing put together over the last year. The delivery is timely since Microsoft is just pushing out the final code of its Windows HPC Server 2008. Both Microsoft and Red Hat have in mind to broaden HPC’s commercial appeal and get SMBs as well as large accounts to sign on.

Cloud Computing Journal - Top 20 Open Source Packages

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

The Open Source Census, the catch-as-catch-can opt-in attempt to discern trends in open source adoption that OpenLogic started, has collected six months worth of data on some 300,000 installations on about 2,000 machines and from this very narrow and probably unrepresentative slice of life has deduced that government and the financial sector are the biggest users of open source “per machine scanned,” Europe is ahead of the United States, OpenOffice is 3:1 more common on personal PCs than on company machines and that there’s a reasonable amount of open source software being used on Windows.

SOA World Expo - Watch Out For WSO2!

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:00:00 EDT

WSO2 is the ambitious two-year-old Sri Lanka start-up that's writing a complete open source middleware platform for Web Services on Intel Capital's nickel expecting it to become the standard. It says it's the same as a comprehensive SOA platform. It is looking ahead to a Mashup Server written in JavaScript this fall. It expects to have an external Web Services Registry this year and it's working on Web Service management. Then come business rules, governance and policy, security and a portal, all based on its Web Services Framework.

Google Wants $4.4 Trillion To Cut US Energy Dependence

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:00:00 EDT

In a week of ludicrously large numbers beyond a normal human being's comprehension of what it will cost to barely survive the current economic catastrophe Google announced that - by its calculations - it will take $4.4 trillion to reduce America's dependence on fossil fuel by 88% by 2030 (and that's only 38% in cars). While the world waited for the US Senate to vote on a patchwork rescue measure to save the global economy, Google Wednesday unveiled its "Clean Energy 2030" plan, which would substitute wind (heaven help the birds), nuclear and geothermic (a particular pet of Google's) for coal and oil to save an estimated $1 trillion between now and 2030.

xkoto Virtualizes SQL Server

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 09:45:00 EDT

Xkoto, the database virtualizer, fielded a Gridscale for Microsoft SQL Server virtualization product today that it says improves application performance, scalability and reliability in SQL Server environments. The active-active widgetry virtualizes the database infrastructure and distributes application loads horizontally across multiple instances of SQL Server. Xkoto says that means better reliability and performance than more costly and complex legacy clustering solutions with their shared storage, partitioning and mirroring.

HP Buys LeftHand to Extend its Virtualization Portfolio

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:00:00 EDT

Dell got its name in the papers late last year when it bought EqualLogic. HP followed suit Wednesday when it said that it was buying EqualLogic’s iSCSI rival LeftHand Networks, the nine-year-old storage virtualization and iSCSI/SAN ISV, for around $360 million cash. Dell paid $1.4 billion cash for its acquisition, a record for Dell.

3Tera Beats Amazon in Windows Cloud Computing Support

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:12:00 EDT

3Tera has put out its AppLogic 2.4 beta, the grid operating system that supports virtual appliances running Windows Server in all the infrastructure components necessary to run Web applications including storage, networking and load balancing. It gleefully sniffs that Amazon only plans to offer Windows support.

White House Asked To Create an IP Czar

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 11:00:00 EDT

The US Congress had trouble passing the “save the world” legislation the White House asked for this week, but it didn’t seem to have any trouble sending the White House a bill the White House didn’t want – and may veto – that would establish a so-called Senate-confirmed IP czar or Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator with cabinet-level chevrons, who’s supposed to chair an inter-agency committee and fight a tougher fight against counterfeiting and piracy worldwide.

Microsoft in the Line of Fire: Ballmer

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:00:00 EDT

As the financial crisis deepened, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who last week said hardware and software sales would be hurt without following that statement to its logical conclusion, raised the decibel level and told Reuters that Microsoft would get hurt – some parts more than others.

Yahoo's Zimbra Reaches Out to Microsoft

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 09:00:00 EDT

Zimbra, Yahoo's open source messaging and collaboration software company whose fate was unclear if Microsoft had bought Yahoo, says it's got a new open extension framework for its Collaboration Suite (ZCS) that will enable two-way interoperability with Microsoft Exchange. It expects the move to encourage large enterprises and academic institutions to explore Zimbra more.

Cloud Computing: Infrastructure and the ‘Hybrid’ Cloud

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 22:00:00 EDT

Two-year-old venture-backed Skytap Inc, a University of Washington cloud infrastructure spin-out, says it’s got an API to enable “hybrid” clouds. Rather than use cloud computing in a silo, Skytap’s Web Services API and one-click VPN functionality create a situation where cloud resources are used as an extension of existing infrastructure.

Bluenog Has Rolled Out ICE 4.0

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Bluenog – a nog being a peg that holds a structure together – has rolled out ICE 4.0, or Integrated Collaborative Environment, calling it the industry’s first pre-integrated suite of enterprise content management, RIA portal development environment and business intelligence reportedly suited to non-technical users.

Does Yahoo Foresee a Bad End to its Google Adventure?

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:00:00 EDT

Canadian antitrust regulators have now gone the same path as the US Justice Department and reached out and hired an outside litigator, David Kent, a Toronto antitrust expert, to look into the Google-Yahoo deal. The news comes from the Wall Street Journal, which got it from “lawyers close to the matter.” The paper couldn’t get Canadian officials to comment.

Appistry Pushes into Public Clouds

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:00:00 EDT

Appistry, the ISV with the grid-based cloud application platform that's been focusing on in-house clouds like FedEx' and Lockheed Martin's, is extending its reach to so-called public clouds beginning with GoGrid and SkyTap. Appistry’s flagship Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF), which makes clouds useable, will be available on the low-level third-party infrastructures.

Red Hat Does Better than Expected

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 01:00:00 EDT

While the American economy dangles by a thread over a lake of molten lava, the American corporation keeps chugging along. Red Hat says it has no material exposure to the debacle and that September has been no different than the beginning of any other quarter. Its pipeline is reportedly “strong.” It earned $21.1 million, 10 cents a share, on revenues up 29% year-over-year, 5% sequentially to $164.4 million in its second quarter ended August 31, slightly better than expected.

Citrix Joins the Cloud Race

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:00:00 EDT

Citrix took its virtualization widgetry, repackaged it, and went into the cloud business Monday, announcing a new Citrix Cloud Center (C3) product family targeted at the would-be hosted cloud services that are chasing both consumers and enterprise data centers. C3 is supposed to be a complete set of infrastructure building blocks for hosting, managing and delivering large-scale, on-demand, cloud-based services, whether infrastructure or applications, on both Windows and Linux.

IBM Lofts Four More Clouds

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 22:30:00 EDT

IBM Wednesday opened four new cloud computing centers in emerging markets. They’re in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Bangalore, India; Seoul, Korea; and Hanoi, Vietnam. That brings the number of IBM cloud centers worldwide to 13. The company brags that it’s got “the world’s largest network of expertise on cloud computing.” IBM argues that extreme data overload, skyrocketing energy costs, increasingly complex regulatory requirements and competition from nimbler economies are pushing customers into cloud computing.

IBM's Got Its Head in the Clouds

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

RightScale Goes Multi-Cloud

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:00:00 EDT

RightScale, the Santa Barbara cloud management start-up, has gone multi-cloud. Besides Amazon’s EC2, where its users reportedly have hundreds of thousands of instances running, RightScale widgetry now works on GoGrid and UK-based FlexiScale clouds too. It’s also working with Rackspace Hosting to support its Mosso and CloudFS infrastructure.

Fujitsu & Siemens Argue Over Price for Fujitsu Siemens

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:00:00 EDT

Strung-out scandal-ridden Siemens wants out of its 50-50 Fujitsu Siemens joint venture. The two companies are negotiating but Reuters says Fujitsu doesn’t want to pay Siemens’ asking price for the German-based concern. So Siemens has also reportedly been having back-up talks with Lenovo, Dell and Acer, all of which want to deepen their European businesses.

Android to iPhone, Blackberry & Nokia: Buzz Off

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:00:00 EDT

The first Android phone, known as the Dream and built by HTC, is reportedly supposed to hit the crowded mobile market probably in a month after being announced Tuesday, September 23 by T-Mobile USA, the Deutsche Telekom arm. The price will reportedly be $199 with a two-year contract. The Wall Street Journal says HTC expects to ship 600k-700k units.

VMware Workstation 6.5 Hits Market

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:10:00 EDT

VMware’s Workstation 6.5, its desktop virtualization widgetry, hit general availability Monday. The latest upgrade of the nine-year-old software, VMware’s original product, can be used to toggle between windows on different virtual machines and debug multi-tier applications while productivity apps run on the same computer.

Wall Street Meltdown Leaks All Over IT’s Shoes

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:00:00 EDT

Wall Street firms, banks and insurers are the single biggest consumers of IT and the IDC-owned Financial Insights research firm calculates that IT budgets for hardware software and service recoiled almost 6% this week because of the Lehman bankruptcy and the eleventh-hour Merrill Lynch acquisition by Bank of America.

CDD Joins Yahoogle Opposition

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:45:00 EDT

The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), one of those public interest media watchdogs that never cottoned to the whole Yahoogle business, has asked Senator Herb Kohl, chairman of the antitrust wing of the Senator Judiciary Committee, to tell the Justice Department to “either oppose or ensure meaningful safeguards” are attached to the pending Google and Yahoo online advertising alliance.

IBM Threatens To Drop Out of Standards Bodies That Don’t Meet Its Standards

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:00:00 EDT

In a snit that Microsoft was able to push its OOXML file format through to ISO standardization, IBM, a big backer of the OOXML-opposing ODF file format, has instituted a new corporate policy that suggests it will pull out of standards bodies whose rules don’t conform to what it thinks their process, membership and IP policies should be. It said it was going to embark on a review of its memberships and is encouraging other companies to adopt similar principles.

Oracle Supports Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:15:00 EDT

Oracle’s 11g Database, Fusion Middleware and Enterprise Manager now support Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Oracle said Monday that customers can use their existing software licenses on EC2 for no additional fees as well as a set of free Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to provision virtual machines with the Oracle software.

VMware Adds To VDI Protocol Collection

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:15:00 EDT

VMware is collecting protocols. Last week it made Teradici’s day and announced that it had licensed the software implementation of the Canadian start-up’s PC-over-IP display protocol technology as a key piece of its so-called PC-replacing vClient initiative.

Intel & Oracle Say "Cloud" in Unison

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 05:30:00 EDT

Intel and Oracle are talking about making enterprise-ready cloud computing more efficient and secure. And they say they’re going to identify and drive standards such as the Open Virtual Format (OVF) that will enable flexible deployments of both public and private clouds. What that largely seems to mean is that the performance of Oracle software on Intel chips will continue to be improved.

Oracle To Sell Hardware

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 01:15:00 EDT

Oracle is going to start selling HP hardware. The world’s second-biggest software company has never sold hardware before. Rivals like Netezza and Teradata sell data warehouse appliances, but now there is something called the HP Oracle Database Machine, a dual-branded system designed for extreme data warehouses that’s supposed to deliver 10x faster performance than Oracle’s current data warehouses.

Samsung Makes Hostile Bid for SanDisk

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 21:00:00 EDT

Samsung has been chasing SanDisk trying to get it to accept an acquisition offer of $26 a share cash, $5.85 billion total, and was frustrated enough with the American flash company’s negative response to go public with its unsolicited, potentially industry-altering, proposition late this evening and publish its letter to the SanDisk board.