You’ve heard of downsizing and rightsizing, so how about Cloudsizing? As properly defined, Cloudsizing is: The improvement of efficiency and effectiveness of an organization through the selective use of computing resources that are delivered over the Internet. Simple but powerful, and fairly obvious, considering all that’s been written about Cloud Computing recently.
CA has announced the planned release of additions and advancements in its Identity and Access Management product portfolio, including CA Federation Manager, a new product designed to ease the deployment and management of federated partnerships; an enhanced CA SOA Security Manager; and an integrated solution for Secure Web Business Enablement that will feature multiple CA Identity and Access Management products including CA Federation Manager and the enhanced CA SOA Security Manager. “As organizations’ IT operations have grown to be more Web-based, CA has been there to help secure and manage that part of their operation, which has become critical to their business success,” said Dave Hansen, corporate senior vice president and general manager, CA Security Management.
OpenSpan and TIBCO have announced a technology and business partnership designed to extend TIBCO solutions to desktop environments. The partnership will enable TIBCO Service-Oriented Architecture, Business Process Management and Business Optimization solutions to more rapidly integrate with desktop applications without requiring changes to those desktop applications. “The OpenSpan technology helps our joint customers service and event enable any desktop application without changing the code and with nearly zero impact to that application,” said Tom Laffey, executive vice president, products & technology at TIBCO.
Emulex has announced that it will offer Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (HBA) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) for use with OpenSolaris’ Common Multiprotocol SCSI Target (COMSTAR), thereby providing end-to-end Fibre Channel and FCoE support within OpenSolaris environments. Emulex’s LightPulse HBAs and CNAs enable Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris customers to evaluate and deploy storage appliances, while experiencing the benefits of network convergence, such as increased server efficiency, and lower power and cooling costs.
Tidal Software has announced Intersperse 8.0, a product that monitors J2EE and .NET applications and their transaction component performance to produce meaningful metrics for managing applications and high-level business processes. The product leverages a combination of lightweight Java Management Extensions (JMX) and byte-code injection to span the need for both lightweight and deep level analysis. This provides a meaningful basis for monitoring and trending the performance of components as well as business processes.
The Java Community Process (JCP) Program Management Office has announced the final results of the 2008 JCP Executive Committees (EC) elections. After two ballot rounds – for ratified and elected seats – the winners are Ericsson, SpringSource, SAP, Intel, and Werner Keil for the Java SE/EE EC and Nokia, Philips, IBM, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB and Sean Sheedy for the Java ME EC.
In an effort to head off its disappearance below the horizon, Sun is going to lay off 5,000-6,000 people, 15%-18% of its workforce, and restructure its software business, never a great money maker. Among the first to go is the head of software Rich Green. Sun said he has chosen to leave the company.
In 45 jam-packed minutes that will include case studies and live technology demonstrations, the VP of xVM at Sun, Steve Wilson, will at this week's 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo be giving a session entitled "Virtualization from Desktop to Datacenter" - in which he will examine how an enterprise can combine the use of layer-2 "desktop" hypervisor technology, layer-1 dedicated server virtualization software and next-generation management software to rapidly speed the rate at which they can develop and deploy new software within their enterprise.
When picturing the relationship between the enterprise and the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model, imagine an evolutionary process that can be divided into three main stages: "The Comfort Zone," "The Enlightenment," and "The Re-Assessment." Once we examine these, we can then decide on the right course of action when choosing how to adapt to the IT demands of the enterprise.
Today’s businesses can no longer afford to have essential business content trapped in separate, incompatible repositories. They want an interoperable interface for their repositories that allows them to reuse and share business content easily. To address this need, EMC, IBM, and Microsoft have led the charge together to draft a Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle, and SAP also collaborated on this work. This draft specification was recently submitted to OASIS for standardization. CMIS consists of a set of web services that an application can use to query, access, and manipulate content that are stored in a compliant content management system. The specification defines a domain model and two protocol bindings: a SOAP/WSDL binding and a REST/Atom binding.
Storage has been like a penitential chain around Sun’s neck and it’s left unspeakable gouges. Sun’s $4.1 billion acquisition of StorageTek was one of the reasons the company wrote off $1.4 billion of its business in the September quarter. But, for the last couple of years Sun Storage has been working on a redemptive widget – called the world’s first Open Storage appliance – and Sun claims OSS will change forever how people buy and manage storage.
InterSystems has announced that Ochsner Health System has selected the Progeny Anatomic Pathology (AP) information system from PathView Systems, an InterSystems application partner. Progeny is built on the InterSystems CACHÉ high-performance object database. Based in New Orleans, Ochsner provides services in 80 medical specialties and subspecialties and has over 8,000 employees.
Jinfonet Software has announced the general availability of JReport 9 on Monday November 10th. The latest release of this reporting solution touts more than 50 enhancements. JReport 9 delivers these enhancements in three key areas: performance, usability and standards support. Performance improvements with the advanced report engine are focused on faster response time and better scalability. Through internal system tuning and minimizing redundancy, JReport now has a smaller footprint with faster response time for on-demand report generation, report delivery, and interactive reporting and analysis. Benchmark results show that it is up to 40% faster compared to the previous version.
The new release of IntelliJ IDEA supports the widest range of modern tools and frameworks, right out of the box. To name a few: UML, JBoss Seam, Spring 2.5, RESTFul Webservices, Flex Debugger, advanced Flex editor, and more
IBM and Sun, like ODF drug dealers trying to poison Microsoft Office, have launched the OpenDocument Format Toolkit Union, a new open source software community project to spread the toxin to business, the main Office constituency and source of mucho bucks for Microsoft. Sun is kicking in an API for reading, writing and manipulating ODF documents and code to accelerate more application development, eyeing content management, business workflows and activities and web-based document solutions.
"With proper markup/logic separation, a POJO data model, and a refreshing lack of XML…" So begins the introduction to one of the current crop of open source Web application frameworks on its Web site. Sadly this seems to be a common sentiment within the Java framework development community; the phrase "XML Hell" is thrown around with the same vehemence once reserved for the "DLL Hell" so characteristic of early versions of Microsoft Windows.
Sun Microsystems has announced the immediate availability and support of the Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server version 3 Prelude, a lightweight Web application server that is based on a modular OSGi architecture. Sun is also providing a preview of features that will be available in the upcoming Java Platform Enterprise Edition 6. GlassFish is one of the leading open source application servers in the industry today with more than 14 million downloads since its first release in May 2005, more than 225,000 registrations in 2008 and hundreds of production deployments around the globe.
Gartner Magic Quadrants position vendors within a particular market segment based on their completeness of vision and their ability to execute on that vision. According to Gartner, vendors in the Leaders quadrant "have a full range of capabilities to support a range of portal deployment scenarios and have demonstrated consistent product delivery in meeting customer needs for a substantial period of time."
InterSystems Corporation has announced that the Department of Veterans Affairs has renewed a contract for Four Points Technology, LLC to provide the InterSystems CACHÉ high-performance object database for the VistA electronic health record system. The contract for enterprise software and maintenance services has been increased to $37.7 million for the current option period. InterSystems develops and markets innovative database, integration and business intelligence software.
SpringSource is an executive member of JCP. Rod Johnson, its representative, is planning to bring a healthy dose of paranoia and openness to the body that guides the future of Java.
Sun Microsystems is on the ropes. The New York Times says so, the hallway conversation starts and ends with "too bad", and the wagons appear to be circling around, or rather, behind Jonathan Schwartz, leaving him outside the fort as the gates are closed. Much of this capitulation to a situation Sun has been in for some time could come from the lessons of this long struggle in our country's political and economic systems, which have become inextricably intertwined to the point where it apparently matters not at all what either candidate does or proposes. Instead, the public intuition is that change in management is less risky then standing pat. With all this pressure on Schwartz, perhaps the best way to view the situation is to determine a so-called Failsafe deadline, so described as the point in time beyond which nuclear bombers can not turn back from their missions. In Sun's case, what difference would a change in leadership make, and at what point?
Sun wouldn’t give any guidance and wouldn’t say whether more layoffs were in the works when it reported late Thursday that it wrote off $1.44 billion worth of its business in the September quarter – its forced answer to the “new economic reality.” All together it lost $1.67 billion ($2.24 a share) in what is for Sun its first fiscal quarter and a bad beginning for the year. The company did not explain which units suffered the goodwill impairment. It said last week that it would write down the value of one or more of its reporting units but didn’t indicate how much that would amount to. It put losses at 25 cents-35 cents a share.
AccuRev and Coverity have announced a new technology partnership that will help software development teams to improve the quality and security of their applications in today’s fast paced agile development environments. Leading development organizations rely on Coverity’s advanced source code analysis products to ensure the integrity of their code and AccuRev’s process-centric software configuration management products to automate and accelerate their development processes.
VMware has announced that Nationwide Services has deployed VMware’s management and virtualization suite, VMware Infrastructure 3, to provide a platform for Nationwide’s Windows application environment. Nationwide Services is a unit of Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company. Nationwide initially deployed VMware Infrastructure to reverse the effects of server sprawl that had pushed the company’s datacenter to the edge of its power and space limitations.
Openadaptor is a software toolkit that may be classified as a lightweight Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solution. It provides a configurable component framework for connecting various systems and middleware implementations. In less technical parlance, the components are akin to Lego building blocks that users can snap together to build adaptors, which themselves are the metaphorical glue or plumbing between applications.