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.
After the bears lopped $70 billion off of Apple’s value in the last few days, the company went bear hunting Tuesday crushing estimates. Net profits in the March quarter were up 94% year-over-year to $11.6 billion returning $12.30 a share compared to estimates of $10.04 on revenues of $39.28 billion against projections of $36.81 billion. Apple sold a completely unexpected 35.1 million iPhones, up 88% and only two million short of Christmas, plus 11.8 million iPads – up 151% even though the new one was only released mid-quarter – and even a respectable 7.7 million iPods, down 15%. Macs, another spot that had the bears worried, were good for four million units, up 7% and in line with estimates, although Apple admitted they suffered iPad cannibalization. International sales accounted for 64% of revenue.
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.
Right after agreeing at the court’s, um, insistence to sit down and parlay with Apple about settling, Samsung up and filed a countersuit claiming Apple’s iPhone infringes eight Samsung patents including a couple that are supposed to be standards-essential and FRAND-protected. (The European Commission, which is investigating Samsung for FRAND abuse, ain’t gonna like that.) The Samsung suit, which comes under the jurisdiction of the very same judge that’s having them try to settle with Apple, is a response to an Apple suit, filed in February, seeking to get Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus phone banned in the United States. FOSS Patents says, “So far, none of Samsung’s infringement claims against Apple has succeeded anywhere on Earth, despite efforts in nine different countries, but Samsung keeps on fighting.” The blog also thinks it’s not smart to provoke the EC.
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 [...]
Apple and Samsung, the two leaders in mobile devices now suing each other in nine countries over Android, have agreed to sit down and try to settle a couple of US patent suits ahead of a trial due to start in late July. It’s not their idea. It’s the idea of federal court judge Lucy Koh, who drew the two Apple v Samsung patent infringement lawsuits, according to the FOSS Patents blog, which has been diligently following all the litigation. To at least look cooperative, the companies agreed to send their respective CEOs Tim Cook and Gee-Sung Choi along with their chief counsels to the San Francisco courthouse sometime in the next 90 days for settlement talks mediated by Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero.
In the past few weeks, bloggers from BetaNews, Gizmodo and TechCrunch have ripped apart the Galaxy Note (and devices like it). You can find their posts here (1, 2, and 3). They have gotten slammed in the comment sections, but I am feeling the need to pile on a bit. Here’s my problem with it; when you write, personal/anecdotal evidence can only get you so far. At some point, you have to look for real, provable facts. 5M people have bought the Samsung Galaxy Note, it’s available worldwide (just like the iPhone) and is only available on a few networks. I personally have one, and it is completely different than any other smartphone I’ve ever used.
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.
A little background so you know what type of experience I have. I have been a Microsoft .NET architect and developer since the first beta release. Before that C, C++, ColdFusion, ASP, JavaScript and of course HTML. Being a .NET developer has many advantages, but the one major disadvantage we suffer has driven me to Java and Objective-C over the past year. That one disadvantage? Microsoft themselves. They come off as completely lost and have wreaked havoc on .NET developer community the past few years.
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
The Justice Department sued Apple and five prominent book publishers Wednesday morning for colluding to fix the price of iPad-borne e-books. The suit was filed in federal court in Manhattan. Sixteen states have filed separate civil suits so far looking for money. Those charged include Macmillan, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Hachette and HarperCollins. Simon & Schuster, Hachette and HarperCollins immediately agreed to settle and terminate their arrangements with Apple, clear any joint e-book ventures with the government and report any communications with other publishers to the DOJ for the next five years.