“JReport 11 continues our mission to deliver data visualization, discovery, and self-service tools to our users on all modern platforms,” noted Dr. Bing Yao, President of Jinfonet Software, on the release of JReport 11. The new release, which provides advanced data visualization with a powerful dashboard system and a mobile solution, features 40+ chart types and styles now enhanced with live charting including motion, real-time, and scrollable charts. Motion charts allow users to dynamically view data trends by auto-playing chart parameters. For example, you can put a chart in motion to show month-by-month changes over the course of a year. Real-time charts enable any web services data feed to be displayed and refreshed automatically. It can be used for monitoring applications, including system performance, stock charts, and real time applications. Scrollable charts let users easily zoom in and out on the chart axis for inspection of details.
Google finally introduced its long-trumpeted cloud-based Google Drive Tuesday hours before Apple released its Q2 results. Drive happens to compete with iCloud and Apple’s results, which could have been, shall we say, edgy, turned out to be over-the-top. Drive also competes with Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Dropbox, Box, Amazon’s Cloud Drive and SugarSync. Google says Drive users will get 5GB of free online storage for videos, photos, songs, files and PDFs that they can upload, create, edit, view, sync, share by way of different rights, collaborate on, get notifications, recognize scanned files, store, search (by word, owner, even some images to a point) and access from anywhere from PCs, Macs and Android devices (Gmail, iPhones, iPads, Chrome OS and Linux to come).
Former Sun CEO Scott McNealy, an off-again-on-again buddy of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, is going to testify for Oracle Thursday in its infringement suit against Google and Android. His appearance could wrap up Oracle’s side of the copyright infringement part of the trial and he could be followed on the witness stand by his successor at Sun Jonathan Schwartz who’s supposed to testify for Google.
The judge in the Java trial told Oracle late Wednesday that it can’t assert the patent that the Patent and Trademark Office just said was valid against Google. It’s too late, he said, although the patent part of the case won’t start until next week or whenever the jury decides the trademark infringement part it’s been hearing since April 16.
The US Patent and Trademark Office has reconsidered its so-called “final” rejection of one of the Java patents that Oracle claimed Google infringed and decided that nine of the patents claims are perfectly valid. Apparently Oracle got wind of the PTO’s change of mind late last week and rushed in Sunday to tell the court about. Conveniently, the claims upheld match Oracle’s to a “T” with a little to spare, and, as FOSS Patents points out, there’s nothing quite like teeth of a re-examined patent. Google, of course, is going to squawk but the way Oracle left it with the court it would only assert patents that weren’t rejected by the PTO. And here the PTO has validated one neatly ahead of the patent side of the case getting heard so it’s likely that Google will have to face charges of violating three Java patents not the whittled-away two.
Eucalyptus Systems, the open source private and hybrid cloud merchant that just tied up with Amazon, has gotten a $30 million C round on top of the $25.5 million it’s already gotten. It says the C round was oversubscribed. The funding was led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). Existing investors, including Benchmark Capital, BV Capital and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) pitched in too. Eucalyptus claims to be the most widely deployed on-premise IaaS cloud platform, but, according to Marten Mickos, who runs the joint, at $55.5 million, Eucalyptus is the “least funded” of the current crop of players like VMware, OpenStack and now CloudStack, which have got hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal.
Rackspace, which wants to be the “Linux of the cloud” mimicking the now billion-dollar-a-year Red Hat, said Monday that it’s “drawing a line in the sand against cloud providers.” Everyone agrees it has Amazon, particularly, and VMware, to a certain extent, in mind. However, what’ll probably end up happening is that Red Hat, which has a prominent part in the open source OpenStack project that Rackspace started, becomes the “Linux of the cloud” because it’s got all the pieces, or thinks it does, but that’s another story. Anyway, Rackspace is inching out with a production-ready OpenStack cloud based on Essex, the fifth and best-yet release of the open source cloud platform put in train by Rackspace and NASA in the summer of 2010.
Modularity plays an important role in software architecture. It fills a gap that has existed since we began developing enterprise software systems in Java. This chapter discusses that gap and explores how modularity is an important intermediary technology that fills that gap. There are numerous definitions of architecture. But within each lies a common theme and some key phrases. Here are a few of the definitions. From Booch, Rumbaugh, and Jacobson (1999): An architecture is the set of significant decisions about the organization of a software system, the selection of the structural elements and their interfaces by which the system is composed, together with their behavior as specified in the collaborations among those elements, the composition of these structural elements and behavioral elements into progressively larger subsystems, and the architecture style that guides this organization — these elements and their interfaces, their collaborations, and their composition.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, decked out in dark Armani duds for the trial of his landmark case against Google and Android, testified Tuesday that he had considered buying RIM or Palm to compete against Apple and its iPhone. Ultimately he decided that RIM was too expensive and Palm wasn’t competitive enough and a separate “Project Java Phone” that Oracle had started was a “bad idea.” Google’s lawyer claimed that because Oracle failed to develop its own product it’s going after Google and Android to get a piece of the action. Google CEO Larry Page, widely reported as uncomfortable on the witness stand and unable to make eye contract except with the ceiling, testified that he couldn’t remember much of anything. He appeared so evasive and said “I don’t recall” or “I’m not sure” to so many of the questions posed by Oracle’s star lawyer, David Boies, that CNBC ran the headline “Blank Page?”
The scenario is fairly typical. You launch your SaaS application for $14.99 per month. A few months later, a competitor launches a competing service for $10 per month. How do you respond with a competitive offer without cannibalizing your existing customers? We asked three software executives for their thoughts on the topic and have summarized their responses. In the above scenario, you are introducing a new tier in the Free->Premium continuum. The inherent risk is that existing customers might want to downgrade to the new level to save albeit with a constrained set of features. While you cannot stop this, one way to have your customers think about this decision is to make the distinction between the SKUs extremely clear in the new tier vs. the premium SKUs. For example, at the low-end customers might be able to only perform 50 transactions a month (or an equivalent measure that makes sense in your business). While this might be okay for someone who is getting on board just to try the service, existing customers must think twice about downgrading for the ever-present fear of "what if I grow?" Usage-based price tiering lets your customers experience the product with little risk then upgrade to customize features to their unique needs.
Clear Data Builder for Ext JS (CDBExt) is an open source tool that automatically builds Ext JS/Java EE CRUD applications given one or more annotated Java interfaces. The generated JavaScript and Java code enforce best Ext JS and Java EE practices and is deployed on the development version of the Tomcat ready to run. A [...]
IBM has gotten as predictable in its acquisitions as it used to be in its suits. It’s buying another analytics house. This time it’s Varicent Software from up Toronto way. And again IBM isn’t saying what it’s paying. Nine-year-old Varicent does analytics software for compensation and sales performance management. More specifically, it automates and analyzes the collection and reporting of sales data across finance, sales, HR and IT. Blue figures it can be used horizontally, and combined with other stuff in its grab bag delivered through on-premise or cloud models. Les Rechan, the general manager of business analytics at IBM, said the Varicent purchase would advance Blue’s efforts to get analytics into the hands of front-line employees in the name of improving the bottom line.
Finally someone has put the most important software architecture practices into words. Within this book lies the concepts that are the heart of true agility. Without a modularized architecture, any decent size project can not achieve agility. I have seen so many agile projects flop because they ignored architecture, in particular they ignored modularization. This book also provides the keys concepts needed to ensure modifiability, the number one quality attribute for any architecture. It drives home the importance of physical design. An often overlooked aspect of designing modularity, yet it is the most important. Good logical design does not really matter if you have a poor physical design.
Citrix Wednesday said it bought Copenhagen-based collaborative work platform Podio to expand its social media offerings for SMBs, figuring there’s going to be a surge in demand for so-called social software by the enterprise as part of the consumerization of IT. Forrester estimates the market for corporate social software will hit $6.4 billion by 2016 compared with $600 million in 2010. Podio can be used by dispersed teams, contractors, partners, clients and projects in sales, recruiting, marketing or any other business function using pre-assembled apps from Podio’s free app market. Citrix says the widgetry unifies content and integrates traditional business apps and new mobile apps as well as the real-time and asynchronous communications required to work in the post PC era.
The mystery of where Australia Post’s recently promised digital mail system is coming from has been solved. It’s going to use Volly, the sight-unseen system that Pitney Bowes announced 15 months ago but has yet to put on the market. Australia Post said so last week making it the first national post to sign up for Volly. It plans to roll out a Volly-based Digital Mailbox service to consumers by the end of the year. Australia Post was spooked into finding something fast by Digital Post Australia (DPA), the joint venture based on technology supplied by the American start-up Zumbox that came out of stealth mode last month and planted its digital flag on the continent ahead of Australia Post making its “me too” move. A digital solution should mean more cannibalization of Oz Post’s plummeting physical mail volumes and consequently lower revenues.
NTT Data, the service provider, has formed a business unit devoted to cloud services. It will be led by Marv Mouchawar as president and he will report directly to CEO John McCain. Mouchawar and his team will be responsible for the overall strategy, portfolio, sales and delivery of services. NTT Data Cloud Services is supposed to draw on the strengths and resources offered by NTT Data globally and in collaboration with the NTT Group of companies including NTT Communications, NTT DOCOMO and Dimension Data.
In his book The Art of Action (2011), Stephen Bungay identifies three gaps that frustrate the ability of organizations to translate plans into actions that lead to desired outcomes. He calls them the knowledge, alignment and effects gaps. Here, I wish to reflect on Bungay’s perspective by reviewing these gaps in terms of the selection and implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. ERP software exerts a significant influence over the way an organization manages and monitors its performance. In large organizations, ERP software can touch hundreds, even thousands of people given that today’s ERP software may have a significant organizational footprint encompassing accounting, supply-chain, manufacturing, human resources (HR), customer relationship management (CRM), environmental, social and governance (ESG) and performance management activities. ERP software is at the heart of organizational management in the world’s leading businesses.
VMM, a member of Microsoft System Center suite, is an enterprise solution for managing policies, processes, and best practices with automations by discovering, capturing and aggregating knowledge of virtualization infrastructure. In addition to the system requirements and the new features and capabilities, there are specific concepts presented in this article, although fundamental, nevertheless important to know before building a private cloud solution with VMM 2012.
In case nobody noticed, IBM put its reputation on the line the other day. It said it had distilled all the years of experience it got from tens of thousands of customer engagements around the world – and nobody can compete with that – into a box, an “expert integrated system” that it made every conceivable marketing claim about, beginning with making everything utterly simple. It said it was a snap to deploy, cuts application deployment time from maybe, say, six months all told to a month, and uses self-healing intelligent software to install, maintain, update and monitor itself and all its parts from operating systems through to applications to cut support costs. Blessedly the thing reportedly doesn’t need ham-fingered human intervention so IT can go off and do cleverer, creative things because it’s no longer worried about just keeping the lights on and spending 70% of its budget on maintenance. The nimble miracle box is called PureSystems – which makes it sound like it’s been through some sort of ritual bath – and it’s supposed to put IBM at the head of the next technology curve.
Monday April 16 is the start of what the judge has called the “World Series of IP cases,” an eight-week trial in which Oracle will seek to prove that APIs are copyrightable and that Google infringed 37 Java APIs when it spun up Android. The trick for Oracle, the judge said, will be convincing a jury that a programming language in the public domain can be infringed. Oracle, on the other hand, will be able to show the jury the now famous 2010 Tim Lindholm e-mail in which the Google engineer flatly told Google’s founders they needed to negotiate a Java license lest they infringe. All the alternatives, he said, “suck.” The judge has previously told Google this e-mail is a hot potato that could burn them.
Everybody acknowledges that IT has to plays a key role in any new service or product design. Therefore, IT needs to align with business and be flexible to changing business needs. It is a question of how to be agile rather than should we be agile. Then, why is there such a gulf between the people who evangelize agile processes and those who look at them with great suspicion? Any application is built to satisfy a business goal. The process has two major steps where the step one is to define the application behavior which will help in meeting the business goal and the step two is to translate the application behavior to a working application. The definition of the application behavior is the requirement specification and it is the link between business and IT. In the waterfall methodology, development starts after the requirement is frozen. It is assumed that if business users can unambiguously and comprehensively specify the application behavior, IT can build the application satisfying the stated behavior. All the management practices based on waterfall methodology is build around this assumption. Times have changed and many of the IT applications are an integral part of the product or service offering. Significant part of the users are external to the organization. The focus has shifted from following the best practices to having innovative offering. If all these points are added up, it becomes clear that requirements will change. This has led to the realization that we need agile processes which works when requirements are constantly changing rather than spending time and energy on freezing requirement. As a result agile processes were born. The key principle behind any agile processes is to have a mechanism where the users can try out the application as it is being built and give feedback so that: - Gap in understanding is reduced - Sub-optimal solution can be improved - Application can be realigned to any change in business goal
When I post a job opening for a Senior Java Developer, people send me resumes, and their titles match my post title. But the meaning of the word “senior” varies depending on the geography. Here in the USA a 22-24y.o. person graduates from college and starts as an intern or a junior programmer working his [...]
The Apple App Store has reached 25 billion downloads, and many of us have bought and enjoy some of them. Really, the apps for iPad, iPhone and Android astonish us many times. The bad part comes when we go back to our desktop computer to use the enterprise software and feel as if we travel in the time some years back. It would be nice, very nice, to be able to use our mobile device to access to our enterprise software. The question is: are native mobile applications ready for enterprise software?
Has the world changed more between now (2012) and 1962 that is the last 50 years or the 50 years prior to that (1962-1912)? Wait a minute! What does this have to do with “Consumerization of IT”? Believe me, there is a connection – just hold your skepticism – humor me – and read on! What we had in 1962 that we did not have in 1912? I am sure you will dispute this list and add / subtract items from them. However, I am fairly certain that after some consideration you will agree that there has been more technological breakthrough between 1912 and 1962 then in last 50 years.
Okay, so an admission before I go one step further – the supermodel in this headline is something of a misnomer or misapplication of the term designed (I shamefacedly admit) to draw the reader in. Forget supermodels if you will and jump straight to megatrends for analyst house Gartner’s latest buzz-phrase to describe the impact that new cloud computing models are having on the way we develop, use and integrate with software applications at all levels. Fundamentally, Gartner is suggesting that users’ use of “personal clouds” (and the various devices they use to access them) effectively signals the end of the PC era in terms of our trusted desktop and laptop devices being the sole (or at least primary) corporate access vehicle.