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.
Mark Papermaster, the ex-VP of blade development at IBM and the guy that IBM stopped from going to Apple to run its iPod and IPhone development on the strength of the non-compete he signed, has sued his former master looking for a declaratory judgment in his favor.
Lightstreamer is a software product for delivering real-time textual data to any kind of application through the Internet. Banks and online-gaming companies typically use it to dispatch live updates to their Web pages or Flex applications, supporting high numbers of parallel connections. Recently, solutions have been released that use Lightstreamer to push live data to the iPhone. There are two active fronts: solutions that push the data to the iPhone browser and solutions that push the data to iPhone native applications.
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.
SYS-CON Events announced today that the leading global virtualization technology provider VMware named "Gold Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo, (www.virtualizationconference.com) which will take place November 19-21, 2008, at the Fairmont Hotel in the heart of Silicon Valley, in San Jose, California.
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.
VMware has announced plans to bring virtualization and its many proven benefits to mobile phones through the new VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). Built on innovative technology acquired from Trango Virtual Processors in October 2008, VMware MVP will help handset vendors reduce development time and get mobile phones with value-added services to market faster. In addition, end users will benefit by being able to run multiple profiles – for example, one for personal use and one for work use – on the same phone.
Last week Circuit City, the second-biggest electronics retailer in the US, decided to close down 25% of its stores, some 155 shops, by December 31 – in part because suppliers wanted to be paid upfront. When its suppliers heard the news it spooked them into demanding even more money upfront – or else no deliveries for the holidays.
When the economy takes a hit, so do cell phone sales. Last quarter, mobile phone sales in the U.S. dropped 15 percent to 32 million units, according to market research firm NPD Group. But in hard times, the strongest brands also take share. And that is exactly what Apple did. The 6.9 million iPhones it sold last quarter catapulted the $200 device into the top spot among all cell phones, even beating out the much cheaper and still-popular Motorola Razr. (Yes, they still sell that thing. They just don't make any money off of it.)
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.
Mark Papermaster, the ex-IBM heavyweight that IBM is suing to stop him from working at Apple, has been named senior VP of devices hardware engineering running Apple’s iPhone and iPod development. He replaces Tony Fadell, pretty much the father of the ARM-based iPod and iPhone, who now becomes a special advisor to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Papermaster will report to Jobs.
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.
Venice Consulting Group (VCG), a leading software development and consulting firm, created the iPhone game "Photo Hunter" for bric | entertainment which has placed in the top 50 of all paid applications on the iTunes App Store. The accomplishment comes only three days after its initial release and attests to the addictive nature of Photo Hunter's new twist on a classic bar game.
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.