Novice venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, which wouldn’t be near so influential if Netscape survivor Marc Andreessen wasn’t at the helm, has raised another $1.5 billion fund in these days of not-so-scarce money. That means it’ll have $2.7 billion under management. Andreessen, who’s accorded rock star status and gets early access to plum investments, says it’s a “very opportunity-rich environment right now.” Naturally he’s looking for the disruptive start-ups. Andreessen Horowitz started in 2009 with $300 million. It’s in all the chi-chi firms like Zynga and Facebook and sold Skype to Microsoft for a pretty penny, $8.5 billion in fact.

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soa.sys-con.com | 2/3/12 8:07 PM

Creating and securing a Spring 3 , Spring WS 2 web service using multiple XSDs and LDAP security.

www.pheedcontent.com | 2/3/12 5:06 PM

Tilera, the wannabe many-core Intel server replacement, said Monday that it’s delivering the expected 16- and 36-core versions of its new 64-bit low-power proprietary TILE-GX processors along with evaluation systems it hopes will give Intel something to worry about. The things should be in volume by mid-March. They’re Tilera’s first 64-bit chips capable of using more memory than its original 32-bit widgets – like 512GB or 1TB. They’ve been shipping in limited quantities – alphas – since September. The start-up claims to have 20 design-wins and 80 “deep” engagements for the GX family that it expects will turn into design-wins – probably this year – because they’re do-or-die mission-critical projects. Forty-seven are in the US, 13 in Europe, and 20 in APAC, mostly China.

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soa.sys-con.com | 2/3/12 4:54 PM

Any organization that has deployed a business application has experienced the joy of procuring database licenses. Most database software licensing models are based on the quantity and type of compute processing cores in the underlying database server – the more cores in the processor and the more processors in the server box, the higher the cost of the database software license. Depending on the application and the business’s expectations, the tolerance threshold for performance can vary. This is typically considered during the design and testing phases of an application deployment lifecycle. Once the application goes into production and data accumulates in key areas supporting mission-critical business processes, performance starts to take a hit. Performance tuning is an art, requiring the skill and experience of the highly coveted and paid performance database administrator (DBA) – an employee who has been, incidentally, identified by industry research as being problematic to retain. [1] That performance guru will add database indexes, rearrange queries, or add additional database objects solely targeted at improving application performance. At some point, performance tuning will only get you so far and returns will start to diminish. DBAs will request more processing power to meet SLAs; more processing power turns into more database licenses not only in production but for every copy of the data. When data is copied to a data warehouse for reporting, to a test or development environment for product support activities, or to a disaster recovery site and there is a corresponding performance expectation for that environment, the production server upgrade now turns into several server upgrades – each with a corresponding increase in database license upgrades.

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soa.sys-con.com | 2/2/12 10:08 PM

Every once in a while, as the number of people following me grows (thank you, each and every one), I like to revisit something that is fundamental to the high-tech industry but is often overlooked or not given the attention it deserves. This is one of those times, and the many-faceted nature of any application infrastructure is the topic. While much has changed since I last touched on this topic, much has not, leaving us in an odd inflection point. When referring to movies that involve a lot of CGI, my oldest son called it “the valley of expectations”, that point where you know what you’d like to see and you’re so very close to it, but the current offerings fall flat. He specifically said that the Final Fantasy movie was just such a production. The movie came so close to realism that it was disappointing because you could still tell the characters were all animations. I thought it was insightful, but still enjoyed the movie.

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soa.sys-con.com | 2/2/12 5:00 PM

The news hit this week : "As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion objects in Amazon S3 .

www.topix.net | 2/2/12 3:17 PM

IBM is buying a privately held 12-year-old Israeli outfit called Worklight for its write-once-run-anywhere application platform and tools for smartphones and tablets. The price IBM is paying wasn’t disclosed. Worklight’s widgetry, which can be used to create and run HTML5, hybrid and native apps, is supposed to put new and existing consumer and employee-facing apps on multiple mobile devices – including iPhones, BlackBerries and Androids – and then securely connect them to a company’s data center. It includes an IDE, middleware, management and analytics and is supposed to reduce time to market, cost and complexity. The apparently key acquisition is expected to close this quarter and be part of IBM’s Software Group.

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soa.sys-con.com | 2/2/12 3:00 PM

Enterprises AND software companies seeking competitive advantage through IT innovation should be aware of this technology shift and actively defining strategies for capitalizing on it. The principles behind Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) were established long before the Internet became a force, and certainly before the appearance of Cloud infrastructure. Although many people consider SOA as well as Cloud to all about ways of building, deploying and managing applications, these technologies and methodologies are also important in making "big data" useful and manageable. Indeed, SOA and Cloud are increasingly becoming so intertwined as to cause major confusion in the marketplace. Let's be clear - there's SOA, and there's Cloud and there's the intersection of SOA and Cloud. That intersection is a very exciting place to be. I remember long discussions on things like CICS which embodied many of the principals behind SOA, and I'm sure there are technologies (and methodologies) older than that which similarly embody various principals of Cloud as well as SOA). Like so many things in this industry, the more things change, the more they seem strangely (though never entirely) similar. I suppose that's evolution for you.

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soa.sys-con.com | 2/2/12 1:15 PM

Tucows is probably best known for their slew of web services and their extensive reseller network, but CEO Elliot Noss sees room to grow in another space: mobile. After spending the past few months conducting a private beta for a hundred users, Tucows has officially opened up their Ting wireless service to all comers. The goal? To offer wireless customers "a whole different type of carrier relationship." "Big name carriers have services meant to maximize their profitability, not their service to customers," Noss told me. techcrunch.com | 2/2/12 10:14 AM

Good data management, analytics, and helping to shape the goals of the business are keys to transforming the enterprise through impactful enterprise architecture (EA). Coming from the siloed past in IT, companies are now moving to business service-driven processes across various resources, Ross said. But they need to recognize the forces around consumption of such services, not just the implementation. Making good data management a priority, a "single source of truth" is also at the heart of making EA valuable, said Ross. Ensuring the quality of data and the speed of data refresh will help enterprise architects rise in performance appreciation more than just about anything else, she said. Ross studies how firms develop competitive advantage through the implementation and reuse of digitized platforms.

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soa.sys-con.com | 2/1/12 5:53 PM

Investors seem pretty disappointed with Amazon's fourth quarter results (as of 3pm Pacific, the company's stock is down 8.6 percent in after-hours training), yet for most of this afternoon's analyst conference call, that disappointment was largely hidden in the normal stream of numbers and financial terminology. Finally, a few minutes before the call ended, one analyst asked CFO Tom Szkutak to directly address the concern that earlier questions had hinted at — namely, that the company seems to be seeing "diminishing return" on its spending. Szutak's initial response? "I'm not sure how to answer that." Yes, he said Amazon is investing heavily (for example, hhe said Amazon had opened 17 fulfillment centers during the quarter, bringing the total to 69), but that's because the company is seeing so much growth — in its own retail business, in fulfillment for third-party retailers, in Amazon Web Services, and so on. As evidence, he pointed to Amazon's 46 percent growth in overall unit sales. (He talked in more detail about media sales earlier in the call.) techcrunch.com | 2/1/12 1:15 AM

It’s just been an accepted fact of the life of an IT professional (and of a data center manager in particular) that sometimes you have to go into the data center to fix things. A single phone call at 3 a.m. means you’re tooling down the road half-awake, hoping to find an open coffee shop on the way to the data center so you can approach the problem with at least some semblance of logic and attention. Remote tools have been somewhat lackluster, and only able to handle certain types of problems. While you can probably connect remotely to restart a given virtual machine or a server, there are countless data center components you can’t access from home.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/31/12 11:15 PM

SmartBear Software on Tuesday announced Code Collaborator 7.0, a major release that makes peer code review more productive and automated than ever before. Featuring revamped navigation, a streamlined, intuitive user interface, and a new SOAP API, CodeCollaborator enables teams to align their code review process with the core principles of agile development and deliver quality software faster. Kirk Poore, Software Engineer at DeniServ, LLC, a subsidiary of Delta Dental, said, “CodeCollaborator 7.0’s newly simplified review screens make it much easier to ensure everyone has reviewed and approved all documents and bug fixes. It also blends easily with Subversion 1.7 to form a nearly seamless process.”

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/31/12 10:05 PM

GridIron Systems, a pioneer in Big Data acceleration, has announced its membership in the NetApp Alliance Partner Program. GridIron is collaborating with NetApp to integrate its TurboCharger SAN acceleration appliance into NetApp unified storage environments. This collaboration will enable customers to increase application performance and support more concurrent users and applications without disrupting operations, while preserving limited budget dollars. Customers can analyze extremely large, data-intensive workloads with boundless and secure storage for better decision-making and business advantage. The GridIron TurboCharger is a SAN-attached appliance that provides a high-performance, transparent access layer between servers and storage to significantly boost the performance of applications and databases with no changes to existing servers, storage, applications or processes. By bridging the I/O gap between servers and storage, the TurboCharger delivers solid-state performance from existing storage and satisfies the concurrent bandwidth and IOPS requirements of demanding applications. By combining TurboCharger with NetApp unified storage systems, customers can leverage their current multi-protocol, multi-vendor storage investments by improving performance and simplifying the management of multi-vendor disk arrays to obtain advanced storage efficiency, data protection, and data management features.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/31/12 8:46 PM

Apple was the leading worldwide client PC vendor in Q4, pushing HP off its perch, according to Canalys, which unlike Gartner and IDC, doesn’t hesitate to lump tablets in with desktops, netbooks and notebooks. It says that since Apple shipped over 15 million iPads and five million Macs last quarter it did 17% of the total 120 million client PCs shipped globally, up 6% year-over-year. Canalys also figures that if tablets are thrown in, the total client PC market grew 16% year-on-year. If they aren’t, the client PC market declined 0.4%. Canalys predicts that “HP will struggle to compete with Apple following the end of its Touchpad” given doubts about how Windows 8 will do on HP tablets once it’s out.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/31/12 8:23 PM

Cloud computing provider Amazon Web Services has added third-party support for operating systems running Amazon EC2, and some system software as well, according to a blog post on Monday .

www.topix.net | 1/31/12 12:44 AM

It’s been described as the "Wild West of Cloud Computing" — no slick "urban" services like Amazon provides, but HP is in beta with its cloud services, and the time is ripe to make your land grab with free real estate (for now) hosted by the world’s second-largest PC maker, looking to move into Web services in a big way.

Read full story... www.cmswire.com | 1/30/12 9:48 PM

Over the past few years we’ve seen firewalls fail repeatedly. We’ve seen business disrupted, security thwarted, and reputations damaged by the failure of the very devices meant to prevent such catastrophes from happening. These failures have been caused by a change in tactics from invaders who seek no longer to find away through or over the walls, but who simply batter it down instead. A combination of traditional attacks – network-layer – and modern attacks – application-layer – have become a force to be reckoned with; one that traditional stateful firewalls are often not equipped to handle. Encrypted traffic flowing into and out of the data center often bypasses security solutions entirely, leaving another potential source of a breach unaddressed. And performance is being impeded by the increasing number of devices that must “crack the packet” as it were and examine it, often times duplicating functionality with varying degrees of success. This is problematic because the resolution to this issue can be as disconcerting as the problem itself: disable security. Seriously. Security functions have been disabled, intentionally, in the name of performance.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/30/12 7:45 PM

If you think that the following points are an oversimplification of a very complex subject of outsourcing agile project – you will be right and I agree with you. However, I think these questions are a good starting point for your research before you actually go ahead and outsource an agile project. You are already engaged in outsourcing and have established a good working relationship with the outsourced vendor. You have tried agile way of working internally and it has worked for you. You want to extend it to outsourced projects.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/30/12 4:45 PM

Every company should plan regular architecture capability maturity assessments using a model. These should provide a framework that represents the key components of a productive enterprise architecture process. A model provides an evolutionary way to improve the overall process that starts out in an ad hoc state, transforms into an immature process, and then finally becomes a well-defined, disciplined, managed and mature process. The goal is to enhance the overall odds for success of the enterprise architecture by identifying weak areas and providing a defined path towards improvement. As the architecture matures, it should increase the benefits it offers the organization. Architecture maturity assessments help to determine how companies can maximise competitive advantage, identify ways of cutting costs, improve quality of services and reduce time to market. These assessments are undertaken as part of the Enterprise Architecture management.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/30/12 1:57 AM

CloudPassage is launching a new security product for virtual servers in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services that it says takes care of the all-important need for security when using services from infrastructure providers.

www.topix.net | 1/28/12 11:19 AM

As companies increasingly adopt more and more SaaS/Cloud based applications, as more and more data are cloud-based, and as social networking data becomes increasingly critical to sales, marketing and customer satisfaction applications, the "old style" integration stacks that were originally created to run on PCs or On-Premises Servers will be a non-optimal solution. This is the normal evolution of things. The mainframe-centric nature of computing gave way to Client/Server which in turn gave way to Internet and then SaaS/Cloud. Just like Mainframe-based applications could never really be retrofitted to be good client/server applications, or how non-relational databases never really worked well with SQL front-ends slapped on, Older architectures (Server or LAN-based application integration suites) can't simply been retrofitted or wrappered to become sky-based.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/27/12 9:14 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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soa.sys-con.com | 1/27/12 7:52 PM

Security specialists are fond of using expressions like “robust protection” and “multi-layered defenses” when it comes to setting out their stall and telling us exactly how they are able to protect our data and applications. Looking closer at enterprise security, we see that lower down the buzzword pecking order for some reason is the word “insight” in its various forms. It seems insight means more than one thing in information technology these days, but perhaps it’s no coincidence that every meaning or interpretation of the term essentially falls somewhere under the umbrella of enterprise security.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/26/12 4:14 PM

Amazon Launches DynamoDB On January 18th, Amazon Web Services launched DynamoDB, which as explained by Werner Vogels, AWS’ Chief Technical Officer in his blog, is an NoSQL database designed for Internet scale web applications. By JP Morgenthal www.infoq.com | 1/25/12 11:09 PM

Amazon Web Services announced Tuesday that it was releasing a public beta of its Storage Gateway, enabling companies to schedule automatic backups to the Amazon cloud. Storage Gateway is a software appliance currently optimized for VMware, although other virtual environments will be supported in the future.

The gateway sends backup snapshots of data to the cloud, while also storing the data locally. Snapshots can be used to readily restore the data to local hardware, and can be accessed as Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes for mirroring data between on-premises and Amazon apps that are based in the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2.

Disaster Recovery, Data Migration

In a statement, Amazon said the gateways make it easy to use its EC2 "for additional capacity during peak periods, for new projects, or as a more cost-effective way to run normal enterprise workloads."

The company said it expected the AWS Storage Gateway would be used primarily for disaster recovery and business continuity, backup, and data migration. AWS cited the advantages of reducing costs for hardware by emphasizing a cloud strategy, and avoiding any concerns about running out of storage space or managing off-site facilities.

Storage volumes created with the gateway can be attached as iSCSI devices to on-site app servers. Amazon said the standard iSCSI interface worked with existing apps and on-premise architecture. Gateway-Stored volumes, available now, maintain a complete copy on local storage, while uploading backup snapshots to Amazon. Gateway-cached volumes, available soon, can use local storage as a low-latency cache for frequently used data, while the clean copy lives in the cloud.

Each gateway can support as many as 12 iSCSI volumes and a total of 12 terabytes, and there can be multiple gateways for each account. If different configurations are needed, users can request special arrangements. Users can choose to store data in...

www.cio-today.com | 1/25/12 7:11 PM

Amazon Web Services launches the AWS Storage Gateway, a cloud storage service that links on-premise and cloud data for disaster recovery.

www.crn.com | 1/25/12 5:46 PM

Amazon Web Services has launched a public beta test of AWS Storage Gateway, which allows enterprises to back up application data in Amazon's cloud using a software appliance, the company said on Tuesday. www.networkworld.com | 1/25/12 2:16 PM

If you think your data is a mess now...just wait. It will get worse, if you're not careful. Maybe even if you ARE careful. That loud rumbling sound you hear isn't thunder, or an earthquake--it's the noise from an avalanche of exploding volumes of data, in places and formats that never existed before. This explosion is making a difficult situation even more challenging, and what's worse, it has a direct impact on business productivity. Only 21% of CEOs have the comprehensive information they need about their customers to make strategic decisions, according to a PriceWaterhouseCoopers CEO report. As with so many other data challenges (such as data quality), the best approach to managing exploding volumes of data--data in a multiplicity of new places and formats--is planning. The avalanche of disparate data, formats and applications has exacerbated a classic organizational challenge: critical data about customers stored in a myriad of different places and formats inside the enterprise, ranging from spreadsheets to databases to various enterprise systems (such as CRM or ERP) as well as various types of structured and unstructured data files.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/24/12 10:50 PM

Consumerization is described as the trend for IT to first emerge in the Consumer space and subsequently makes its way into the enterprise world. But what exactly in the consumer world, that is making the users, demand the similar things from the enterprise IT. To understand the underlying need, we need to first examine the basic requirements of the user. Kathy Sierra, co-creator of the Head First series of books and founder of javaranch.com, describes the hierarchy of needs from the user(s) perspective. The needs are stacked in the order of increasing engagement from the user. Starting with the basic needs of a defined functionality and its correctness, moving on to the learnability, efficiency & usability and finally culminating in intuitiveness and enchantment. Merely provision of correctly working functionality is not guarantee of the success of the application(s). The idea is to hook the user; the application needs to do something extra.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/24/12 9:00 PM

Remember InterDigital? That’s the Pennsylvania patent-licensing company that hired Evercore Partners and Barclays Capital last summer to sell its patents, raising punters hopes that Google would buy it to console itself for losing the $4.5 billion Nortel mobile patent auction to Apple, Microsoft and friends. Players bid its stock up 50 bucks to a high of $82.50 in three days on such speculation little suspecting Google would turn around and buy Motorola Mobility and its patents a few weeks later for $12.5 billion. Well, Monday evening InterDigital’s board announced that it was giving up the hunt for a buyer and would try to increase the firm’s cross-licensing and patent sales instead.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/24/12 8:32 PM

A Dutch appeals court Tuesday rejected an injunction-seeking Apple bid to overturn a lower court’s decision last August that Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 isn’t a copy of the Apple iPad and doesn’t infringe Apple’s design rights. Apple was also denied a preliminary injunction in the United States on a design-related patent equivalent to its European Community Design IP and is appealing the decision. FOSS Patents says the Dutch appeals court, like the US district court, narrowed the scope of the Apple IP based on prior art and so came to its conclusion. Apple got a preliminary injunction in Germany using the design IP last summer, a decision a German appeals court could lift for the same reason next week. Last Tuesday Apple filed two more design-related suits against Samsung phones and tablets in Germany but didn’t ask for injunctions.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/24/12 6:53 PM

I have yet to meet anyone in Dev or Ops who likes alerts. I’ve also yet to meet anyone who was fast enough to acknowledge an alert, so they could prevent an application from slowing down or crashing. In the real world alerts just don’t work, nobody has the time or patience anymore, alerts are truly evil and no-one trusts them. The most efficient alert today is an angry end user phone call, because Dev and Ops physically hear and feel the pain of someone suffering :) Why? There is little or no intelligence in how a monitoring solution determines what is normal or abnormal for application performance. Today, monitoring solutions are only as good as the users that configure them, which is bad news because humans make mistakes, configuration takes time, and time is something many of us have little of. It's therefore no surprise to learn that behavioral learning and analytics are becoming key requirements for modern application performance monitoring (APM) solutions. In fact, Will Capelli from Gartner recently published a report on IT Operational Analytics and pattern based strategies in the data center. The report covered the role of Complex Event Processing (CEP), behavior learning engines (BLEs) and analytics as a means for monitoring solutions to deliver better intelligence and quality information to Dev and Ops. Rather than just collect, store and report data, monitoring solutions must now learn and make sense of the data they collect, thus enabling them to become smarter and deliver better intelligence back to their users.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/24/12 5:15 PM

Research In Motion late Sunday named Thorsten Heins, 54, one of its co-COOs, president and chief executive, replacing co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie in the hopes the move reverses the company’s dramatic nosedive and calms irate investors whose stock lost three-quarters of its value last year. Heins’ appointment is the succession plan Lazaridis and Balsillie presented to the board. Both Lazaridis and Balsillie, who reportedly weren’t pressured to hand over the reins, mean to stay on the board so there’s no clean break, which may be one of the reasons why RIM’s stock dropped more than 6.8% at the open to ~$15.83. Lazaridis, RIM’s co-founder and co-chair, will become vice-chair and head the board’s new innovation committee. He is supposed work closely with Heins “to offer strategic counsel, provide a smooth transition and continue to promote the BlackBerry brand worldwide.”

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/23/12 5:30 PM

Mobile development tools are changing rapidly. I had started work on comparing cross-platform mobile tools about a month back. I had initially started with a list of 26 tools. Few got added on the way. However, what is most interesting is that in this short period of time one of the tools (Open Plug) was … Read more

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/23/12 4:00 PM

Management and technology consultancy BearingPoint on Monday announces the acquisition of business analytics solution Hypercube. With the transaction BearingPoint reacts on an increasing challenge many companies face regarding their business performance and perspectives: how to handle and use a growing amount of available data in business processes. Hypercube offers a solution to quantify 'big data' with very high precision, to identify opportunities and hedge risks along the entire value chain. The software generates easy to understand formal rules immediately usable by end-users and thus improves the way companies make decisions. By acquiring the technology BearingPoint expands its service portfolio in the fast growing asset based consulting field and offers market-specific analytics applications. "The integration of the software is important for meeting future needs of our customers in handling and using 'big data' in their business processes", says Peter Mockler, Managing Partner at BearingPoint. "Business analytics will become one of the most challenging prospective corporate requirements. Thus, with the transaction we are taking another important step in extending our role as one of the leading business consultancies internationally."

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/23/12 2:13 PM

Top executives at NoSQL startups are putting on a brave face in response to Amazon Web Services' new DynamoDB offering.

www.topix.net | 1/21/12 5:41 PM

Building on their education and training video platform for startups and SMBs, Grovo is today launching an "Expert Series" that aims to "shed light on the evolving world of Web 2.0," in which entrepreneurs, small business owners, celebrities, journalists, and investors will offer insights into successful operation strategies, brand building, differentiation, how to leverage social media, and everything in between. The goal is to not only help others understand how to use popular web services and tools, but why they're important and how they've helped grow their own businesses. techcrunch.com | 1/21/12 1:14 AM

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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soa.sys-con.com | 1/20/12 8:09 PM

A rare, if not unheard of, confluence of stars Thursday meant that IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Google all reported their calendar Q4 numbers after the market closed. Of the lot only Google came a cropper, losing $57 after-hours, down 8.9% when last we looked to $582.58, on a scary drop in its search advertising. Paid clicks were down 8% while costs were up 35%. Earnings were up 6.3% but that still counted as a miss by Wall Street’s lights. Google was supposed to return $10.49 a share on revenues of $8.41 billion. Instead it did $8.22 on record-breaking $10.58 billion, up 25%, which worked out to $8.13 billion after paying commissions. The reaction may, in part, be a way to punish Google for buying Motorola Mobility, which delivered a disappointing quarter on January 6 on depressed device sales. The purchase, if regulators wave it through, will likely play havoc with Google’s income statement.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/20/12 6:44 PM

The research I've been conducting and writing about for the past several months provides a relative, “pound-for-pound” look at the IT expenditures of 80+ nations of the world. This image is popular among the people I meet in the Philippines, the home of pound-for-pound champion boxer/congressman/national hero Manny Pacquiao. But my work seeks to find “torque” within societies, on the premise that IT is disruptive and furthermore that a highly aggressive commitment to it may be aggressively disruptive. Thus I've named it the Tau Index, as the Greek letter Tau is used to measure torque (and related characteristics throughout the sciences.) Comparative images that work here include a motocross cycle, a Formula 1 car, and the Space Shuttle. All are powerful, with plenty of torque. All are to be taken seriously. It's just a matter of degree – what type of market are you living in, hiring in, developing in, sourcing in, or investing in? Torque is “twisty” (and therefore, potentially disruptive) power that must be handled carefully. And to be sure, several nations listed in my original Top 25 list in late 2010 became headline-grabbers during the Arab Spring in 2011. Other top finishers included Ukraine (which maintains a tenuous peace among two rival factions) and Vietnam (which is starting to make headlines with rumblings of labor unrest). I've modified the list since its original publication, adding a few more dimensions and working to smooth out the data integrations within the index. I've also focused more on the achievements of developed nations, after focusing more on developing nations in the early stages of my research. The stars among the developed nations are less likely to undergo the revolutionary change found in the most highly rated developing nations, but are clearly in transformative phases that could leave their neighbors in the dust some day. I embarked on the Tau Index to answer questions I've had about the “look and feel” of places I've visited. Why does Southeast Asia feel more energetic and vibrant than Latin America, even though the economies throughout these regions are similar? Why does Sweden seem more dynamic than neighboring Norway? Why do the BRIC nations not impress me with their dynamism as much as many other places? What in hell is wrong with the United States these days? This year, I'll be focusing on the presence and impact of cloud computing within the nations of the world. There are easy ways to measure its presence, but a more difficult task to determine its impact. I'm confident my formulas and calculations will let us discern at least a measure of said impact. For now, here are the most highly rated countries in my current calculations, tiered up within income levels: Developed Tier A (per capita income $30K+) 1. Sweden 2. United Kingdom 3. Japan 4. Singapore 5. Canada Developed Tier B (PCI $16K-$29K) 1. Czech Republic 2. South Korea 3. Slovakia 4. Hong Kong 5. Slovenia Developing Tier A (PCI $7K-$16K) 1. Hungary 2. Romania 3. Saudi Arabia 4. Poland 5. Russia Developing Tier B (PCI $3K-$7K) 1. Malaysia 2. Bulgaria 3. Thailand 4. South Africa 5. Tunisia Developing Tier C (PCI <$3K) 1. Bangladesh 2. Ukraine 3. Morocco 4. Egypt 5. Honduras 6. Senegal 7. Vietnam 8. Pakistan 9. India 10. Kenya, Philippines (tie) Follow me on Twitter

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/20/12 2:45 PM

Sharing code across teams poses many challenges. Each team will have its own release schedule and agenda and will not be aware of each other’s day-to-day activities. Sharing code successfully across teams requires proper planning and infrastructure. In this article I share ten suggestions that have come from lessons learned from my real world experience as the lead on a large-scale infrastructure project.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/19/12 10:45 PM

Amazon Web Services just rolled out a fully managed NoSQL database service that promises fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. DynamoDB aims to compete with Oracle, Salesforce.com and Database.com, as well as Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine.

With DynamoDB, Amazon's big idea is to help enterprises offload the admin burdens of operating and scaling distributed databases. In Amazon's view, that means no hardware provisioning; no set up; no configuration; no replication; no software patching; no partitioning; and no cluster scaling. DynamoDB offers pay-as-you-go pricing.

"Amazon has spent more than 15 years tackling the challenges of database scalability, performance and cost-effectiveness using distributed systems and NoSQL technology," said Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. "Amazon DynamoDB is the result of everything we've learned from building large-scale, non-relational databases for Amazon.com and building highly scalable and reliable cloud computing services at AWS."

Low Cost, Low Complexity

Amazon is hammering its differentiator: scalability. While traditional databases aren't designed to scale to the performance needs of modern applications, which can experience explosive growth and cause a single database to rapidly reach its capacity limits, Amazon said DynamoDB mitigates the risk of automatically partitioning and re-partitioning data as needed to meet the latency and throughput requirements of highly demanding applications.

"We are always evaluating new technologies that will enable us to handle our large, varying workloads," said Darren Person, chief architect of Elsevier. "Operating a distributed data store on our own is orders of magnitude more complicated and expensive to manage than traditional databases. DynamoDB delivers a high-performance service that can be easily scaled up or down to meet our needs, helping us eliminate complexity and lower costs."

Amazon said customers typically witness single-digit millisecond latencies for database read and write operations. DynamoDB stores data on solid-state drives and replicates it synchronously across multiple AWS Availability Zones in an AWS...

www.cio-today.com | 1/19/12 9:45 PM

Representational State Transfer (REST) style web services are very popular. They offer simplicity and flexibility of choosing the content in which they can be consumed. This session focuses on the pros and cons of using binary format as a content for the RESTful web services. In this talk, Google Protocol Buffers will be used as [...] www.indicthreads.com | 1/19/12 11:24 AM

Code 42, the Minneapolis start-up that peddles CrashPlan, the automatic real-time PC and mobile backup and recovery service aimed at consumers, SMBs and the enterprise, has gotten a $52.5 million investment from round leader Accel Partners and Split Rock Partners. It’s the company’s first investment. It’s reportedly been profitable since it launched the widgetry in 2007. Accel dipped into its new $100 million Big Data Fund for the first time for its share. Code 42 says it’s got some 4,000 enterprise customers including Adobe, Google, Groupon, HP, LinkedIn and NASA and 100PT of data stowed in the cloud: its cloud or private clouds, other computers or devices or some combination or all of these options. That represents a total of 100 billion file and it reportedly gets 250 million unique new files a day.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/18/12 9:49 PM

Amazon Web Services launched a new, fully managed NoSQL cloud database the cloud services giant said handles all of the database heavy lifting with rapid scalability.

www.crn.com | 1/18/12 9:42 PM

PowerBuilder 12.5 introduced a number of significant enhancements to web services support, both for creation and consumption. We’re going to look at what those new features provide and how to use them. We’re also going to look at how we can package some of that functionality so that it can be used from PowerBuilder Classic applications as well. First though, some background. When support for a web service client was first introduced in PowerBuilder 9, it was done based on an open source library called EasySOAP. There were some limitations with that implementation, primarily because the EasySOAP library only supported SOAP 1.1, was limited to XML over HTTP transport, and provided no support for ancillary web services standards such as WS-Security.

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pbdj.sys-con.com | 1/18/12 8:09 PM

Amazon Web Services is adding a home-grown NoSQL database to its ever-expanding roster of cloud computing offerings.A DynamoDB is what Amazon CTO Werner Vogels called a "fully managed" NoSQL implementation that the company built and tested over the years.

www.topix.net | 1/18/12 6:12 PM

An unattributed rumor put in play Tuesday by the Boy Genius blog has RIM interested in selling out and Samsung interested in buying it, or some piece of it, if RIM’s co-CEOs weren’t asking so much. The other possibility is that RIM will license its IP to other companies. Jefferies analyst Peter Misek thinks it more likely RIM will license its newfangled Blackberry 10 operating system for 10 bucks a pop to Samsung and HTC. He also thinks RIM might finally get an independent chairman, who could kick off a formal strategic review of the floundering company’s options and set in train a major hardware restructuring. BGR thinks the BlackBerry Messenger and several other Blackberry enterprise features would be a swell way for Samsung to differentiate Android, make it a bigger threat to Apple and lessen Google’s control. It said, “We have heard that [RIM co-CEO] Jim Balsillie is actively meeting with almost every company that might be interested in either a part or all of RIM, in addition to having talks about licensing. ‘Jim is going hard after Samsung,’ said a source with knowledge of the negotiations.’” The speculation tickled RIM’s stock price 8%-10%. RIM’s market cap is about $9 billion. BGR thinks RIM is looking for $12 billion-$15 billion or between $22.90 and $28.60 a share. Its stock, which closed at $17.47 Tuesday, lost 75% of its value last year. Meanwhile, Samsung is planning to merge its internally developed bada mobile operating software with Tizen, the open source successor to Intel’s Meego Linux OS, in the search for an alternative to Android. It might try to license the combo to other Android OEMs who might be interested since Google is buying hardware rival Motorola Mobility. The Linux Foundation is supposed to be putting HTML5 support in Tizen. Unavailable in the US, Bada owns 2.2% of all smartphones according to Garter.

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soa.sys-con.com | 1/18/12 4:00 PM

Unspecified vulnerability in the Oracle Web Services Manager component in Oracle Fusion Middleware 11.1.1.3, 11.1.1.4, and 11.1.1.5 allows remote attackers to affect confidentiality via unknown vectors related to Web Services Security. web.nvd.nist.gov | 1/18/12 2:00 AM