Java developers might want to think about hoisting Terracotta on their shoulders and marching around JavaOne this weekend. The company thinks it's overcome the garbage collection-created impasse preventing Java apps from using lots of memory just when lots of memory has gotten terribly fashionable in modern servers. And the solution is a lot cheaper and simpler than buying what amounts to a mainframe for Java from Azul. It'll be at JavaOne showing off the beta of its new BigMemory pure Java add-on for Enterprise Ehcache. The widgetry, compatible with all the popular JVMs, offers an off-heap cache that frees Java applications from the memory and performance restraints of garbage collection by managing the memory directly.
HP confirmed Monday morning that it means to buy ArcSight, the 10-year-old anti-hacking house, for $43.50 a share or around $1.5 billion all told, a 24% premium for a company that it reputedly wanted to buy for $800 million a couple of years ago before it went public. Since the unconfirmed report in the Wall Street Journal Sunday afternoon suggested an auction, the punters bid ArcSight’s stock price up over the $43.50 HP said it’s going to pay, hoping for a repeat of the 3PAR run-up. The Journal said it heard ArcSight was shopping itself around to a bunch of big technology companies and looking for $42 a share. It was at $28 on August 26 when the paper first reported it was for sale and closed Friday at $35.10.
Privately held Arizona-based GoDaddy.com, the world’s largest registrar of Internet domain names, figures it’s time to cash out and has put itself up for auction. The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, says it could fetch more than a billion dollars.
Fresh from its acquisition of 3PAR for $2.35 billion, HP Sunday afternoon was reported close to buying ArcSight for around $1.5 billion by the Wall Street Journal. That would be something like a $300 million premium on ArcSight’s market cap lately.
NetApp and Oracle have called off their ZFS litigation, settling without telling anybody what the terms of the settlement are or if anybody’s licensing anything from anybody or paying any royalties. However, NetApp said Thursday that it and Oracle want the lawsuits dropped without prejudice, meaning neither of them is retreating from their position and the thing could flair all over again or presumably with somebody else. In case you’ve forgotten the muddle, NetApp sued Sun Microsystems back in 2007 claiming that the vaunted Zettabyte File System (ZFS) that Sun open sourced in 2005 infringed on seven of its patents.
With the Intel Developer Forum practically upon us, Intel is mere hours away from showing off Sandy Bridge, its first processor with integrated graphics and a hex sign to ward off advances by AMD/ATI and purveyors of discrete graphics in general. The widget, whose meddle still has to be proved, goes into production in Q4. It should mean better performance, lower power consumption and lower costs – at least for Intel. AMD’s competing Fusion chip should be in boxes in Q1.
Labor and IP lawyers have started handicapping the chances of HP’s suit keeping former HP CEO Mark Hurd from working at Oracle. Apparently they’re pretty dim because California, a right-to-work jurisdiction, doesn’t buy the doctrine of inevitable disclosure that it’s based on. Canon law says all it takes to commit a sin is intent so if you meant to rob that bank and chickened out you’re still liable. In California you actually have to rob the bank.
SAP's Business ByDesign solution is designed to address its SME customers' specific business opportunities and challenges in building a business set up to successfully scale over time. In his session at the 7th International Cloud Expo, Prasad Akella, Vice President, SME Solution Marketing at SAP, will discuss how SAP is addressing the need for an easy-to-implement, low-cost solution for small and growing businesses.
Intel has bought four-year-old Israeli start-up called Neocleus – at least its people and technology – a rare albeit market-sputtering Xen-based bare-metal client hypervisor designed for security and focused on the enterprise. Apparently it can deliver VDI offline. Intel paid a sub-million dollar pittance according Globes although Battery Ventures and Gemini Israel poured a reported $22 million into the joint. BigFix, recently bought by IBM, was its first OEM.
Sun’s last CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, the guy who nominally sold the joint to Oracle, has started a new company called Informed Biometry to do something – exactly what is still unclear – but it appears to have something to do with health because it’s got a web site at www.pictureofhealth.com and offices in San Francisco – where Schwartz apparently is – and Seattle – where the start-up’s other founder CFO Walter Smith, an ex-Microsoft, ex-Apple developer, apparently is. They have a manifesto on the web site that reads: “Most places on Earth, the Internet is more accessible than electricity, clean water, or basic sanitation. That’s an amazing proliferation, and an outstanding opportunity to apply simple technologies to some of the world’s most pressing problems. We’re setting out to do exactly that, focusing on the intersection of innovation and public health.”
First in a series of interviews dedicated to learning more about JetBrains Development Academy Experts. In this interview we have a conversation with Academy Board Member Michael Hüttermann begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting. Michael is Cologne JUG leader, author, senior coach, consultant, and freelancer for Java/JEE, SCM/ALM and agile software development.
That is the big news this morning. Mark Hurd, former CEO of HP who resigned abruptly last month, has landed at Oracle as co-president replacing Charles Phillips. Larry Ellison publicly defended him and said in a letter to the NY Times that this was a big mistake by HP’s board to let Mark Hurd go. Clearly, Mark joining Oracle is good news for the future of Oracle. He proved to be a very effective executive at HP over the last five years. Under his watch, HP made the largest acquisition (EDS). Mark is operationally a very effective executive and Oracle will benefit greatly from that experience. I think he may be groomed to become Oracle’s CEO when Larry is ready to leave that role. Given Oracle’s move into hardware and storage (besides its traditional software business), an executive like Mark Hurd would be the most appropriate to provide leadership. He will also continue the aggressive acquisition streak of Oracle. Rumor has it that Oracle is likely going to acquire Netezza and may even go after EMC.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is increasingly considered “enterprise grade” by many IT buyers, and a viable choice to achieve reduced costs, improved service, and ongoing timely functional currency. Customers are looking for "just what I need" solutions – in terms of pricing, functionality, simple on-boarding and minimal infrastructure hassle. Demand for SaaS Delivery is therefore continuing to grow while sales of traditional on-premise solutions are declining. Thus the Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) need to decide whether and when to develop SaaS-based offerings, identify the potential changes to the customer relationships, demand, etc. for a SaaS-based offering, and determine the best architecture and infrastructure options available to provide these offerings. Based on these decisions, the ISVs need to create a roadmap to “SaaS-ify” the existing offerings.
Anybody starting a war with Red Hat better watch out. Its board has named General H. Hugh Shelton (US Army Retired), a two-term former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as its chairman replacing former CEO Matthew Szulik. Shelton’s been on the Red Hat board since 2003 and was previously its lead director. He currently serves on the audit and compensation committees.
HP Tuesday sued its ousted CEO Mark Hurd to block him from going to work for Oracle as co-president, a job just announced Monday night. HP has taken its civil case to California’s Superior Court in Santa Clara alleging misappropriation of trade secrets. It claims Hurd can’t possibly do his new job at Oracle without putting HP in peril and complains that it paid him tens of millions of dollars in severance to sit on the sidelines and keep its secrets for two years. It is suing him under a confidentiality agreement, not a non-compete agreement. Non-competes generally don’t get very far in the California courts. Oracle of course must have anticipated that HP would sue and just decided to brazen it out.
In a breathtakingly unprecedented move never before seen in the Valley, Oracle very late Monday - and on a national holiday in the US - swapped the ex-Morgan Stanley guy who was supposed to be responsible for its blazing trail of acquisitions for ex-HP CEO Mark Hurd, a month to the day since Hurd was ousted by the HP board for reasons that are still incomprehensible to everyone outside of the HP boardroom, an event that has led to speculation that HP was somehow played. Anyway, it's safe to say that the ex-CEO of a major OEM has never skipped to a competitor before - or so quickly - or trailing sexual harassment charges, however bogus. Ain't life grand. According to the official statement out of Oracle Hurd will be an Oracle co-president, reporting to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and a member of the Oracle board. He will be responsible for Oracle's sales, marketing and support.
How can organizations use enterprise/private cloud capabilities to improve information-sharing? In his session at the 7th International Cloud Expo, Ira A. (Gus) Hunt, CTO to the CIO of the Central Intelligence Agency, will discuss how the Intelligence Community has been using enterprise/private cloud capabilities to improve information-sharing across the entire community. Ira A. (Gus) Hunt currently serves as the Chief Technology Officer for the Chief Information Officer in CIA. In this capacity he is responsible for setting the strategic technology direction to enable CIA’s missions, actively engage across the IC to share and communicate IT solutions, and drive solutions for the rapid insertion and adoption of new capabilities to keep pace with technology change in the commercial sector.
HP’s got a private cloud-in-a-box scheme that it trotted out Monday ahead of VMworld called HP CloudStart that’s supposed to provide the cloud-smitten enterprise that’s hanging back everything it needs to get cloud-borne in a mere 30 days complements of HP’s Cloud Consulting Services, so what it’s gonna cost is anybody’s guess. It’s also promising that the platform will push out into a hybrid environment down the road. HP will sell CloudStart, which is for compute services, in Asia-Pacific and Japan to start, expecting to go global in December.
Citrix, which claims to be the most widely deployed cloudware around, in part a factor of running both Amazon and Rackspace, is buying six-year-old VMLogix and its LabManager and StageManager products, old hypervisor-agnostic friends that automate virtualization management in private and public clouds. The widgetry will turn up in Citrix’ OpenCloud infrastructure platform, its tarted-up Xen stack, to help it take on VMware management. Terms were not disclosed. Citrix said it would add lifecycle automation so virtual workloads can migrate between production stages with a single mouse click.
Intel is buying Germany’s Infineon Technologies’ profit-struggling wireless baseband chip business for $1.4 billion cash, roughly three times revenues. It’ll give the semi giant a piece of Apple’s ARM-based iPhone business and a position in other Atom-free wireless widgets. ARM is the smartphone king, but presumably Intel is going to try to push Atom over the hump using Infineon though it needs more than that. Intel, which has banged its head against many a wall trying to figure out phones, means to run the operation as a free-standing operation. It sold similar operations like the ARM-based XScale for cheap back in 2006 to focus on its core business, which is now under market pressure.
Tim Negris contends it's virtually certain that Larry Ellison is going to be asking Mark Hurd to run Sun for him.
Google has pulled out of JavaOne because Oracle is suing Google claiming that Android infringes on its Sun-inherited Java IP. Google blogged that the lawsuit made it “impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally” though that open source gambit may not play. It probably can’t get its bronze sponsorship money back, only cancel its sessions. Meanwhile, Java’s grumpy creator James Gosling, who couldn’t stomach the jump to Oracle, has run up some “Java. Just Free It. Hold Oracles to their Pledge.” T-shirts for the September 19-23 event – or anywhere they might be useful. See http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-javaone.html.
Gartner was late in pooping on the PC party. Intel had already confirmed Wall Street reports that consumer PC sales were crapping out by the time the research house took down its forecast for the second half a half-hearted couple of points, reducing its growth projection to 15.3% against an easy compare. It cited the uncertain economic outlook for the United States and Western Europe as well as sheer supply chain fear. “There is no doubt,” it said, “that consumer, if not business PC demand has slowed relative to expectations in mature markets. Recent dramatic shifts in the PC supply chain were in no small part a reaction to fears of a sharp slowdown in mature-market demand. However, suppliers’ risk-aversion is as much a factor in these shifts as any actual downshift in demand.”
Inter Bounded Task Flows (BTF) communications are aided in JDeveloper 11g by the use of contextual events, a BTF publish-subscribe mechanism for passing data between BTFs. Yet in some situations contextual events may be the equivalent of "using a sledge hammer to crack a nut", where developers try and use them everywhere when there are alternative techniques available that may work just as well. This blog documents a technique for allowing a master ADF application utilising the ADF UI Shell to provide services to a child BTF, including passing data backwards and forwards, without the use of contextual events. While the blog demonstrates a solution within context of the ADF UI Shell, the overall technique should be useful in other ADF solutions.
Back in my younger days, I could run a sub seven-minute mile. When I heard about somebody running a five-minute mile, I thought “now that’s really fast.” Today, the world record for the mile run is 3:43:13, set in 1999 by Hicham El Guerrouj from Morocco. In the ’80s, IT projects felt like they moved at the pace of an eight-minute mile. We took the time to write detailed requirements, detailed design documents, thorough project plans, test plans, you name it. If someone had a new idea or a new process on how to “do it right,” it was implemented. I recall hour-long meetings on ways to improve processes on projects and conversations around what wasn’t being documented that needed to be documented in case somebody asked the question “where’s that documented?” We even took the time to write detailed communication plans, which is something that I haven’t seen in a while. At some point during my career, upper management started asking the question “can you move the project along faster by adding more people?” So we would add a few more developers, cut the QA testing cycle and shaved off a few weeks on the project schedule. It began to feel like a six-minute mile run. Fast-forward to today and it feels like projects are clipping at the pace of a three-minute mile. Fast just wasn’t fast enough! At times, I’ve left work with a splitting headache, a plethora of emails to read when I got home, and pondering if this truly is the current state of IT projects?