HP continues to divulge bits and pieces of a road map for the ill-starred and nearly-orphaned webOS. The company has followed up its December plan to release webOS mobile platform and development tools with a proposed timeline, with a full release set before year’s end.  Some people see a life for the associated Enyo JavaScript Read the rest... ajaxian.com | 2/3/12 12:21 AM

Amazon’s cloud, which, let’s face it, is still pretty much developer turf, broadened its push into the enterprise Wednesday with the introduction of AWS Storage Gateway, a beta virtual appliance nominally meant to automate enterprise data backup to S3 while creating a comfort level with the cloud among the leery. It’s the first time Amazon has proposed putting its own software on the ground inside a corporate data center. And the stuff’s targeted at large corporations. Amazon says some customers asked for such a solution. It also expects resellers to offer the service. It is of course proprietary and a competitive problem for other cloud storage and gateway suppliers. Come to think of it, Amazon as repository of corporate data is a problem for a lot of people.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 1/29/12 5:00 PM

Intel last year bid billions trying to get the Nortel patents. Thursday RealNetworks said Intel was paying it $120 million cash for 190 “foundational media” patents, 170 patent applications and next-generation video codec software good for stuff like streaming. The IP is apparently supposed to brace Intel’s Ultrabook, smartphone, tablet and digital media interests. Intel’s also picking up Real’s video codec engineering team. Real retains “certain rights to continue to use the patents in current and future products.” RealNetworks and Intel signed an MOU to collaborate on future support and development of the next-generation video codec software and related products.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 1/29/12 1:00 AM

Each week I conduct market research on HTML5 that includes news, quotes, market growth and developments around HTML5 and share the more interesting ones here with you. I hope you find it useful. A new survey from Evans Data shows that 43 percent of developers in North America and 58% in the Asia Pacific region are using HTML5. The trend is expected to grow even further in 2012. Read Original Content CEO of web framework and tool provider Sencha, Michael Mullany, states “Looking at the phenomenal rise of HTML5 as the next industry standard for Web development, it's clear that 2011 has been a transformational year for this powerful set of Web technologies.”

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ajax.sys-con.com | 1/23/12 9:27 PM

A federal court in California has upheld the validity of a key RPost patent reinforcing the company’s claims to own the technology for registered, legally recognized, court-admissible evidence of e-mail content and delivery going back to 1995. RPost’s 35 patents, granted in 21 countries, broadly cover verifiable proof of e-mail delivery and value-added outbound e-mail processing. On December 27 the District Court for the Central District of California granted RPost a summary judgment finding its US patent 6,182,219 valid. The decision is a lead-up to RPost’s infringement suit against Trustifi Corporation but the 20-page ruling is expected to impact the suits RPost also has pending against Swiss Post, Canada Post, Adobe-Echosign, DocuSign, Zix Corporation, RightSignature, Farmers Insurance and Telarix, among others. They are all being sued for treading on ‘219 as well as other RPost patents.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 1/22/12 9:00 PM

Microsoft staged a Private Cloud Day Tuesday to herald the coming of System Center 2012 sometime between now and the end of June. System Center 2012 will put Microsoft squarely in the private cloud business and put VMware’s teeth on edge because it’s cheaper and reportedly has the same bells and whistles as VMware’s widgetry. According to IDC VMware will have to start competing on price. Once Microsoft’s private cloudware is out there it’ll have the makings of a hybrid model – which is what most people say they want – governed by the same management tools and offering a consistent view of application performance and data in both environments. Microsoft, by the way, says it recognizes that users want to consume cloud capacity from a number of partners.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 1/22/12 4:00 PM

Shim was developed within the Boston Globe’s media lab as a way to study how Web sites look on various devices and browsers. A laptop intercepts all wifi traffic – this is redirected to a custom node.js server – which inserts a javascript, or “shim,” at the head of each web page that is visited. Read the rest... ajaxian.com | 1/15/12 6:01 AM

After announcing support for Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 8 and 9 in dynaTrace AJAX Edition Premium we now also provide support for the latest versions in the dynaTrace AJAX Edition. The latest version of dynaTrace AJAX Edition 3.4 therefore gives you full JavaScript, AJAX, Network and Rendering analysis support for Mozilla Firefox 8 and 9 as well as Internet Explorer 8 and 9. You can also check out the Release Notes for a more detailed description of the enhancements.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 1/11/12 4:30 PM

After announcing support for Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 8 and 9 in dynaTrace AJAX Edition Premium we now also provide support for the latest versions in the dynaTrace AJAX Edition. The latest version of dynaTrace AJAX Edition 3.4 therefore gives you full JavaScript, AJAX, Network and Rendering analysis support for Mozilla Firefox 8 and 9 as well as Internet Explorer 8 and 9. You can also check out the Release Notes for a more detailed description of the enhancements.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 1/11/12 4:30 PM

Workday, the six-year-old SaaS ERP start-up co-founded by David Duffield after a resistant PeopleSoft finally fell to Oracle, is planning to IPO in the second half of next year, according to two unidentified Bloomberg sources. It’s supposed to want to raise $200 million-$500 million. Workday, a threat to Oracle and SAP, is credited in some quarters with provoking SAP to spend $3.4 billion on SuccessFactors, a direct competitor, a price that could tickle Workday’s valuation. It has raised in the neighborhood of $190 million over repeated rounds, including an F round in October that reportedly included Michael Dell and Jeff Bezos. Duffield has also supplied millions of its bankroll. Bloomberg says the company is in the market for an IPO-savvy CFO.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 12/25/11 7:00 PM

EMC is going to raise the price of hard disk drives 5%-15% starting the first of the year. It said in an advisory to its channel that the price hikes will last for the duration of the crisis that has seen an estimated one-third of the world’s HDD supply effectively drown in the unforgiving Thai floods. That probably works out to something like 50 million-70 million drives. Senior VP of global channel sales Gregg Ambulos claimed that EMC had absorbed the cost increases produced by shortages in Q4 “to shield our partners and customers from the impact of higher drive pricing,” but now that supplies and stockpiles have shrunk further and capacity demand keeps escalating EMC’s going to have to pass the increases along “to offset the continued high drive prices we are seeing from our primary suppliers.”

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ajax.sys-con.com | 12/24/11 4:00 PM

After an eight-week trial Novell’s private antitrust suit against Microsoft for monopoly abuse went to the jury early Wednesday morning. The jury reportedly deliberated into the evening after peppering the judge with questions about what the AP said was technical testimony presented at trial. One of the notes sent out was said to have baffled the judge and he told the jury to disregard the issue. Novell claims it should be paid around a billion dollars on the allegation that Bill Gates killed an interface WordPerfect needed to be Windows 95-compatible to give Microsoft Word a market advantage. The move supposedly forced Novell to sell the once-reigning word processor and its companion Quattro Pro spreadsheet to Corel at a $1.2 billion loss in 1996.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 12/18/11 7:00 PM

In the next two weeks Amazon said Monday that it’s going to update the software in its $199 Kindle Fire over-the-air to address buyer complaints about the performance of the vaunted seven-inch Android tablet. It’s supposed to make the balky touchscreen easier to navigate and let users erase recent activity as well as choose what items are displayed. If that’s all, it won’t address all the gripes including scrolling, Wi-Fi and Internet access and stodgy apps. Some of the widgets have reportedly been returned. TechCrunch says the Fire is just fine inside Amazon’s “walled garden.”

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ajax.sys-con.com | 12/17/11 10:00 PM

Facebook Software Engineer and HipHop for PHP team member Jason Evans provides details on Facebook’s move to a new high-performance PHP virtual machine. Described by Evans is ”a new PHP execution engine based on the HipHop language runtime that we call the HipHop Virtual Machine (hhvm).” He sees it as replacement for the HipHop PHP Read the rest... ajaxian.com | 12/11/11 4:15 AM

Microsoft and HP’s enterprise services arm have buddied up on the cloud for the next four years. HP’s Enterprise Cloud Services, the company’s IaaS widgetry, will host Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, SharePoint Server 2010 and Lync Server 2010. HP will also host Office 365 for its private cloud customers and resell the stuff on Microsoft’s cloud. There will be a hybrid solution that lets companies access Microsoft’s public cloud through Office 365 and access a private cloud through HP Enterprise Cloud Services.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 12/10/11 6:15 PM

Greenplum, the Big Data open source database outfit that EMC bought, announced a singular next-generation Unified Analytics Platform (UAP) Thursday that will combine its database for structure data with Greenplum Hadoop for unstructured data – either the open source Apache Hadoop or the more proprietary, more advanced MapR Hadoop that EMC has been peddling. It’s supposed to blend the co-processing of structured and unstructured data with Chorus 2.0, Greenplum’s workflow productivity engine, and “shatter current barriers to collaboration” impeding data science teams from working together across dispersed geographies with very large data sets.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 12/10/11 5:00 PM

SmartBear Software has unveiled LoadComplete 2.0, the latest version of the company's load testing tool for Web applications. Featuring new support for rich Internet applications (RIAs), LoadComplete 2.0 now makes it easy to create and run realistic load tests, without scripting, for websites built using Adobe Flash and Flex, AJAX, and Microsoft Silverlight technologies. New data presentation and reporting options make it easier for users to control data parameters and interpret and diagnose results to improve the performance, reliability, and user experience of Web applications. Mathijs Groen, QA Engineer, Benelux, at Kewill B.V., said, "LoadComplete 2.0 is an economical and efficient tool for us to more easily test the performance of our rich Internet-based applications and compare performance statistics by running it on several types of application servers. This enables us to better assist customers by providing them with the most ‘smoothly running' framework."

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ajax.sys-con.com | 12/8/11 1:00 PM

SmartBear Software has unveiled LoadComplete 2.0, the latest version of the company's load testing tool for Web applications. Featuring new support for rich Internet applications (RIAs), LoadComplete 2.0 now makes it easy to create and run realistic load tests, without scripting, for websites built using Adobe Flash and Flex, AJAX, and Microsoft Silverlight technologies. New data presentation and reporting options make it easier for users to control data parameters and interpret and diagnose results to improve the performance, reliability, and user experience of Web applications. Mathijs Groen, QA Engineer, Benelux, at Kewill B.V., said, "LoadComplete 2.0 is an economical and efficient tool for us to more easily test the performance of our rich Internet-based applications and compare performance statistics by running it on several types of application servers. This enables us to better assist customers by providing them with the most ‘smoothly running' framework."

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ajax.sys-con.com | 12/7/11 5:25 PM

Egnyte wants you to bury your file servers – their day is over – and now it claims you can throw your FTP servers into the hole too like they were grave goods to be discovered and wondered over by some next-century archeologist. In their place Egnyte (given the silly way we spell things you’re supposed to say ignite) proposes its HybridCloud, a next-generation storage, file-sharing and backup scheme originally targeted at SMBs that lately – at least in the last three quarters – has been attracting large accounts, including 30 departments in the Fortune 1000. It’s thought to resolve a psychological barrier to cloud adoption by reassuringly keeping copies of what’s in the cloud on-premise. That’s obviously why they call it HybridCloud. Companies aren’t supposed to feel they’re losing control of their data.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 12/4/11 5:00 PM

Rambus took a 78% nose-dive Wednesday afternoon after it lost its potentially $12 billion private antitrust case against memory makers Micron Technology and Hynix Semiconductor. It had charged them with price fixing, interfering with its collaboration with Intel and conspiring to prevent its RDRAM memory chips from becoming a PC standard. A California state court jury weighed its verdict an extraordinary two months after a three-month trial and came back with a surprise 9-to-3 verdict clearing Micron and Hynix of collusion.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 11/20/11 8:00 PM

After casting a pall on the future of Flash by canceling any further development of Flash on mobile devices last week, Abode has abandoned its Flash-based Flex application SDK to the tender mercies of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), reinforcing the idea that Flash is ultimately toast, burned by rival HTML5, a posthumous victory for Steve Jobs who openly loathed Adobe’s stuff. Flash’s future looks bleaker still considering Flex can build both desktop and mobile apps. The Apache Foundation will have to vote on whether it will take Flex and its roadmap under its wing. Flex has been open source since 2008 but will have to shift out from under Adobe’s control and be managed as an independent project.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 11/19/11 5:00 PM

Activist investor Relational Investors LLC has reportedly taken a ~1% position in Hewlett-Packard and its co-founder Ralph Whitworth has gotten a seat on the inimitably dysfunctional HP board. His appointment will raise the number of seats to 14. According to Bloomberg Whitworth took advantage of the precipitous plunge in HP’s stock price on August 18 when former HP CEO Leo Apotheker announced that HP was buying Autonomy for close to $10.3 billion, abandoning webOS devices and might dump its PC business, a move it nixed last month. Apparently he kept buying through September. He will reportedly join the board’s compensation committee and its finance and investment committee. Bloomberg says it contacted HP CEO Meg Whitman and chairman Ray Lane last month and told them “he’d bring credibility and focus Hewlett-Packard on using its cash to buy back shares, increase its dividend or put more money into research and development.” Apparently they folded like a house of cards a few weeks later.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 11/19/11 4:45 PM

HTML5 is a draft specification for the next major iteration of HTML. It represents a break from its predecessors, HTML4 and XHTML. Some elements have been removed and it is no longer based on SGML, an older standard for document markup. HTML5 also has more allowances for incorrect syntax than were present in HTML4. It has rules for parsing to allow different browsers to display the same incorrectly formatted document in the same fashion. There are many notable additions to HTML, such as native drawing support and audiovisual elements. In this excerpt, we discuss the features added by HTML5 and the associated JavaScript APIs.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 11/16/11 9:14 PM

You don’t agree with that? Have you ever looked at the details of your page load time and analyzed what really impacts Page Load Time? Let me show you with a real life example and let me explain that in most cases you only control 1/3 of the time required to load a page as the rest is consumed by third-party content that you do not have under control. When analyzing web page load times we can use tools such as dynaTrace, Firebug or PageSpeed. The following two screenshots show timeline views from dynaTrace AJAX Edition. The timelines show all network downloads, rendering activities and JavaScript executions that happen when loading almost exactly the same page. The question is: Where does the huge difference come from?

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ajax.sys-con.com | 11/15/11 10:31 PM

Earlier this week, Adobe VP and General Manager Danny Winokur disclosed that the company has concluded that HTML5 is ”the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.” The company said it would stop building Flash to run on mobile browsers. In a blog post on the new focus of Read the rest... ajaxian.com | 11/13/11 2:04 AM

Adobe said Tuesday that it’s going to restructure and let 750 people in North America and Europe go, 7% of its workforce, to focus on products that create digital content on multiple devices and platforms and digital marketing. In other words, its newfangled Creative Cloud, due out next year, and the Omniture-Demdex-Auditude side of the business. “Our mission is to produce the world’s content and maximize the impact of that content,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said in a statement. Adobe will cut its investment in enterprise software. It’s reportedly shutting down remote US development locations and getting ready to move more of the next release of Creative Suite (CS) development to India and China, suggesting that the sunset of Flash as we know it is commencing. Flash will be replaced by HTML 5 helped along by Adobe’s recent acquisition of HTML 5 house Nitobi Software. ZDNet says Adobe has quietly told developers that that development of its mobile Flash browser plug-in will stop. Current Android and RIM’s Playbook configurations will get critical bug fixes and security updates. Otherwise, Adobe “will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations.” The company will focus instead on tools for creating mobile apps by packaging the code to run on Adobe AIR. Sounds like a win for the late lamented Steve Jobs. By Wednesday Adobe had blogged about its decision at http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html . It sayd Flash development for PC will continue. The move will reportedly take six months to play out. People are supposedly being told to finish and ship CS6, find another job in the company if they can, or get lost. Sounds like after CS6 ships, especially if the next two quarters aren’t exactly swell, Adobe might can more people. At the moment Adobe expects to take a restructuring charge of $87 million-$94 million, primarily for severance. And because of the charge it cut Q4 guidance from 41 cents-50 cents a share down to 30 cents-38 cents a share. As a result, its stock capitalized after-hours dropping 9% to $27.69. Immediate revenue guidance was unchanged at $1.07 billion-$1.12 billion but next year revenue could be 4%-5% lower. Wall Street expected 2012 revenues to be up 9%. With the changes, Adobe expects to drive “faster and more predicable growth in FY2013 and beyond.”

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ajax.sys-con.com | 11/10/11 3:00 PM

Adobe said Tuesday that it’s going to restructure and let 750 people in North America and Europe go, 7% of its workforce, to focus on products that create digital content on multiple devices and platforms and digital marketing. In other words, its newfangled Creative Cloud, due out next year, and the Omniture-Demdex-Auditude side of the business. “Our mission is to produce the world’s content and maximize the impact of that content,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said in a statement. Adobe will cut its investment in enterprise software. It’s reportedly shutting down remote US development locations and getting ready to move more of the next release of Creative Suite (CS) development to India and China, suggesting that the sunset of Flash as we know it is commencing. Flash will be replaced by HTML 5 helped along by Adobe’s recent acquisition of HTML 5 house Nitobi Software. ZDNet says Adobe has quietly told developers that that development of its mobile Flash browser plug-in will stop. Current Android and RIM’s Playbook configurations will get critical bug fixes and security updates. Otherwise, Adobe “will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations.” The company will focus instead on tools for creating mobile apps by packaging the code to run on Adobe AIR. Sounds like a win for the late lamented Steve Jobs. By Wednesday Adobe had blogged about its decision at http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html . It sayd Flash development for PC will continue. The move will reportedly take six months to play out. People are supposedly being told to finish and ship CS6, find another job in the company if they can, or get lost. Sounds like after CS6 ships, especially if the next two quarters aren’t exactly swell, Adobe might can more people. At the moment Adobe expects to take a restructuring charge of $87 million-$94 million, primarily for severance. And because of the charge it cut Q4 guidance from 41 cents-50 cents a share down to 30 cents-38 cents a share. As a result, its stock capitalized after-hours dropping 9% to $27.69. Immediate revenue guidance was unchanged at $1.07 billion-$1.12 billion but next year revenue could be 4%-5% lower. Wall Street expected 2012 revenues to be up 9%. With the changes, Adobe expects to drive “faster and more predicable growth in FY2013 and beyond.”

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ajax.sys-con.com | 11/10/11 3:00 PM

China says it’s developed a Linux-running supercomputer using a natively developed 16-core 64-bit RISC chip called the ShenWei SW1600. It’s unclear if the Chinese started from scratch with a brand new architecture or based the processor on existing American designs. Reports suggest it could be a reverse engineered DEC Alpha 21164, others something beholden to Intel. It’s supposed to be capable of 140 Gflops at 1.1GHz. Last year China built what was for six months the world’s fastest supercomputer out of Intel and Nvidia parts. It was dethroned by a Fujitsu machine using Sparc chips.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 11/6/11 8:00 PM

Nexenta, the OpenStorage shop, didn’t set out to get into the VDI business. It happened when it kept hearing the same complaints in engagements with VMware. That led to the new NexentaVDI provisioning and rapid deployment solution, which is supposed to make the world a happier place by getting rid of the nasty storage and systems management complexities in virtual desktop infrastructures with end-to-end automation. And it’s all done with a little plug-in for VMware View 5 that talks to a dashboard with real-time analytics and masters View’s tiered storage. Frankly it sounds uncommonly simple.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 10/29/11 6:00 PM

Dell and EMC have finally split after a profitable 10-year run. Dell’s not going to resell anymore EMC products like its Clariion SAN arrays, Celerra NAS servers, Data Domain deduplication appliances and VNX NAS/SAN combo arrays. Instead it will sell its own widgetry in competition with EMC. The Dell-EMC relationship started coming apart in 2007 when Dell bought EqualLogic. Dell’s attempt to buy 3PAR last year strained it some more and it’s buying Compellent Technologies a few months later for its Clariion-competitive mid-range storage really tore it. There’s been expectations of a divorce ever since.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 10/23/11 5:00 PM

Citrix Thursday morning said it bought a cloud-based data storage, sharing and collaboration shop called ShareFile that will add data to its “Follow-Me” desktop and apps platform. Terms were not disclosed. Apparently the five-year-old North Carolina concern never brought in any venture capital. Citrix called the acquisition “highly strategic.” ShareFile’s widgetry, directed at business, lets users share files across multiple devices and access them from anywhere. Citrix is betting the so-called personal cloud, where people aggregate their unique apps, data, preferences and friends, will be worth billions by 2015.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 10/17/11 12:00 AM

IBM wants 200 million users on its cloud widgetry by the end of next year. It has to get to them before Oracle, HP or Dell do. It projects $7 billion in revenue from cloud computing hardware, software and services by 2015. To advance its ambition it’s unveiled a new “simplified” enterprise-grade public cloud PaaS it calls SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS) that will ride on its SmartCloud Enterprise and Enterprise+ IaaS, which won’t be deployed globally until the end of next year. Initially it’ll be US-only. SCAS is supposed to be safe enough for new and traditional mission-critical enterprise applications development and deployment. IBM promises cloud-based economics along with enterprise-grade security and governance, open Java and “cross-platform support with no vendor lock-in.” It’s to beta later this quarter with what IBM calls “business-centric” SLAs. What they are exactly isn’t clear. Among Blue’s offerings is a new SmartCloud for SAP Applications service for automating the most common labor-intensive tasks associated with managing SAP environments in the cloud. The widgetry will put all databases on the cloud IBM said.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 10/15/11 7:00 PM

With its eye on Amazon Web Services and Amazon’s attractions for business, Google has set up App Engine Premier Accounts, an enterprise service for its restrictions-beset PaaS that abandons per-user, per-app pricing. For $500 a month, it’s promising premier support, a 99.95% uptime SLA and the ability to create an unlimited number of apps. Interested parties, however, are advised to read its terms of service and definitions of downtime before rushing in. Google is demanding that users try hard to fix any problems before bothering Google in writing and don’t expect any help on weekends or late at night.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 10/15/11 6:00 PM

Intel’s Parallel Extensions for JavaScript, code named River Trail, hooks into on-chip vector extensions to improve performance of Web applications. Details of Intel’s attempt to get on the JavaScript juggernaut emerged last month at its developer event. The prototype JavaScript extension offered by Intel is intended to allow JavaScript apps to take advantage of modern parallel Read the rest... ajaxian.com | 10/8/11 8:38 PM

As it kicked off its yearly developer event, Adobe announced that it had acquired Nitobi Software, maker of PhoneGap open source software for cross-platform mobile application building with HTML5 and JavaScript. In a blog, Nitobi CEO Andre Charland pledged to pursue donation of the PhoneGap code to the Apache Software Foundation ”to ensure open stewardship Read the rest... ajaxian.com | 10/5/11 4:52 AM

Apple and Samsung could have a decision on whether Samsung’s Android-based Galaxy Tab 10.1 will be temporarily banned in Australia next week pending trial for patent infringement. As part of the drama the Wall Street Journal said the court heard evidence from Apple’s then-chief patent counsel Richard Lutton that Steve Jobs tried to head off hostilities last year because Samsung was such a large supplier to Apple. Obviously since their litigation has gone global his phone call was futile. Some weeks ago Samsung informally agreed to withhold the challenged tablet from the Australian market until the court rules. It countersued in Oz on September 17 charging the iPhone and iPad with infringing seven of its patents.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 10/1/11 7:00 PM

The Greenplum side of EMC has unveiled what it claims is the industry’s first complete Big Data analytics appliance. The thing is a tweak of the company’s two-socket Xeon EMC Greenplum Modular Data Computing Appliance (DCA) and combines a shared-nothing MPP relational Postgres database with enterprise-class Apache Hadoop and third-party BI and ELT applications. It’s supposed to co-process both structured and unstructured data in a single machine. Scott Yara, vice president of products of Greenplum, says co-processing means “the fast, bidirectional sharing of structured and unstructured data between relational and Hadoop modules within a single appliance to allow each system do what it does best and achieve a whole that’s much greater than the sum of its parts.”

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ajax.sys-con.com | 9/24/11 6:00 PM

Platfora, a Hadoop analytics start-up, has gotten $5.7 million in Series A money from Andreessen Horowitz and the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel. The fledging is trying to make pretty, understandable graphs out of big petabytes-size Hadoop data. Its product, which will compete with Datameer’s, won’t be available until next year. It says Hadoop lacks the interactivity and sophisticated reporting capabilities needed by business users. It’s aiming to work with existing Hadoop clusters, including Cloudera, MapR and Amazon EMR, among others, and automatically turn the questions business users pose into dimensional and predictive dashboards, reports and insights.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 9/17/11 8:00 PM

It’s maybe a year before any Windows 8 products come out but Microsoft started pushing what it called its “re-imagined,” next-generation operating system to developers this week at its Build conference in California. Evidently it’s trying to freeze the market before its PC empire is utterly chipped away by the upstart Apple and Android. Microsoft is supposed to be “re-imagining” all its widgetry “from the chipset to the user experience” to run on or through the cloud, an exercise that’s supposed to equate to re-imagining Microsoft itself while Windows remains at its core and every business is cloud-optimized and tied together. Backward-compatible with Windows 7, on which it is based but requiring less memory, Windows 8 is both a leap into OS-disenfranchising cloud services and a tablet catch-up – at least for ARM tablets. It made no firm promises about Intel tablets but reassured the crowd that the highly rated ARM development is keeping pace with its Intel development although Microsoft didn’t show it.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 9/17/11 6:00 PM

Dell has made its first serious cloud move and gone into the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) business using VMware’s multi-tenant virtualized vCloud Datacenter Services environment hosted in a Dell data center. It’ll provide vCPUs, memory, storage networks, IP addresses, firewalls and catalog capabilities. The widgetry, called simply Dell Cloud, is still in closed beta with a half-dozen customers ahead of expected rollout in the fourth quarter in the US and next year in EMEA and Asia Pacific-Japan. There should be a public beta in September. It’s just a first IaaS move. Dell means to add Azure and OpenStack next year. (Remember earlier this year when Dell said it would put a billion dollars into new data centers?)

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ajax.sys-con.com | 9/4/11 5:00 PM

Despite the shrinking government dollar Intel has formed a brand new Intel Federal LLC subsidiary to “address new opportunities in working with the US government” on HPC, including exascale computing with the Department of Energy and other agencies. It says “Reaching supercomputer performance levels of a hundred times more powerful than today by 2018 will require the combined efforts of both industry and government. An ExaFlop supercomputer’s performance is the equivalent of every person on Earth making about 150 million calculations per second.” The subsidiary is supposed to give Intel “the ability to establish and maintain the unique processes, procedures and controls needed to develop and manage programs with the government.”

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ajax.sys-con.com | 9/3/11 5:45 PM

Between Google buying Motorola Mobility, HP exiting the PC business, Steve Jobs resigning, the stock market behaving like a Coney Island rollercoaster and a rare once-in-a-100-years East Coast earthquake felt by most of the United States and Canada, you might have missed a piece in Forbes by Forrester Research senior analyst Leslie Owens saying HP’s proposed $10 billion-something acquisition Autonomy, a roll-up sorta like CA or, oh heck, Oracle, hasn’t solved the problem HP is buying it for and that’s to manage unstructured data for competitive advantage. She says it’s not “the integrated and complete EIM solution HP laid out for investors” but rather a “pile of technologies that HP will need to make sense of.”

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ajax.sys-con.com | 8/28/11 6:00 PM

VMTurbo, the two-year-old start-up doing application performance-directed intelligent workload management software, has hired former Citrix Xen Products Group general manager Louis Shipley as president and CEO. He replaces VMTurbo founder Shmuel Kliger, who will now focus on product and technology strategy as well as strategic partnerships. The outfit claims thousands of organizations worldwide, including British Telecom, NASA and Colgate-Palmolive, are using its year-old widgetry. It’s supposed to deliver Quality of Service (QoS) for virtualized mission-critical apps, using an economic scheduling engine to dynamically adjust resource allocation to meet business goals. Shipley has done the CEO gig a couple of times before. VMTurbo is backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 8/27/11 6:00 PM

Out to get its share of the shrinking federal gravy train, Amazon Web Services Tuesday came up with AWS GovCloud, which it claims is safe enough for Washington and its legion of contractors to run “more sensitive” workloads on by resolving at least some of the regulatory and compliance issues that have restrained them from using the cloud before. Amazon’s timing is nice since the Office of Management and Budget recently told federal agencies they have to close down 800 of their way-too-many data centers by 2015. Amazon says GovCloud is a new AWS Region physically and logically accessible only by US persons so that should overcome the restrictions hindering, say, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which governs how organizations manage and store defense-related data, from using the cloud.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 8/21/11 5:00 PM

Google last week got a patent on estimated shipping time that it applied for on January 25, 2007. It’s titled “Electronic shipping notifications” and the abstract of US No 7,996,328 reads: “A broker facilitates customer purchases from merchants. Shippers ship shipments containing the purchases from merchants to the customers. A shipper identifies a shipment using a shipment identifier. The broker uses the shipment identifier to obtain the status information for the shipment from the shipper. The broker analyzes the status information in combination with other information to calculate an estimate of the time that the shipment will arrive at the customer’s address. The broker sends an electronic message, such as an e-mail or text message, to the customer prior to the estimated shipment arrival time to inform the customer of the impending arrival. The customer can thus arrange for someone to be at the shipping address to receive the shipment at the estimated arrival time.”

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ajax.sys-con.com | 8/20/11 8:00 PM

Year-old PHP PaaS hoster AppFog, née PHP Fog, has gotten an $8 million B round led by Ignition Partners with participation from new investors Simon Crosby, Citrix’ former data center and virtualization CTO, and VC Matt Ocko as well as existing investors, Madrona Venture Group, First Round Capital and Founders Co-Op. That makes $9.8 million altogether. Ignition gets a board seat and Ignition managing director Frank Artale will fill it.

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ajax.sys-con.com | 8/14/11 2:15 PM