Adaptive Planning, whose cloud-ified collaborative SaaS platform lets finance, sales, HR, and other management teams work together to plan, monitor, report on and analyze financial and operational performance using business data from across the organization, has gotten $22 million from Norwest Venture Partners. Existing investors Cardinal Venture Capital, Clairmont Capital, Monitor Ventures, and Onset Ventures kicked in. The company had a $10 million D round in ’08 and a $7.5 million C round in ’07. The new money is supposed to tickle its sales and product development, and push it into new channels and markets. It’s targeting Excel and hopes to scale its direct sales and partner channels worldwide, and deliver a broad set of new performance management capabilities.
Open source storage solutions, such as OpenStack Swift, have several benefits such as no vendor lock-in. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Dickinson, a Project Technical Lead at Rackspace Hosting, will explore the ABCs of Swift, one of the largest open source object storage projects, beginning with the question of whether or not an open source cloud storage solution is right for you. He'll also explore real-world scenarios in addition to the lessons learned from building and running the largest OpenStack Swift Clusters in the world at Rackspace.
The venture capital boys must have been bitten by the largesse bug. Another cloud company has pulled in a monster fourth round. Apptio, which already has $41 million, is getting a fresh $50 million from newcomer T Rowe Price (mostly) as well as existing investors Andreesen Horowitz, Greylock, Madrona Venture Group and Shasta Ventures, evidently persuaded the four-year-old start-up is on to a billion-dollar market. It makes enterprise B2B SaaS software that lets CIOs manage, monitor, budget and forecast their IT spending, including online services. They’re supposed to use it to communicate IT’s cost, quality and value to business management. It will use the money on sales expansion, product development and customer service. It’s going to hire more people adding about 100 to its staff of 260 by the end of the year.
Come May a better-late-than-never Hewlett-Packard is going to go into the multi-tenant public cloud business à la Amazon’s infrastructure-as-a-service according to what the head of HP’s cloud services Biri Singh told the New York Times the other day. The difference is supposed to be more business-ready software with a lot of third-party services, not so different structured and unstructured databases and data analytics-as-a-service. Naturally the analytics will be coming from HP’s Vertica and pricey Autonomy acquisitions. A year getting cobbled together – shades of Léo Apotheker – and based on the Nova compute piece and Swift object store borrowed from OpenStack, the Rackspace-NASA open source cloud project – the widgetry’s been in private beta since September. Apparently it’s not supposed to be exclusively self-service, which’ll give HP’s peddlers and support staff something to do.
So, the new Basecamp is out, released with much applause (and yes, a few groans). We reviewed it last week and found it super promising. Exciting stuff. What’s more exciting than the sexy new project management tool, though, is how it was released. 37signals, the company behind Basecamp, basically rewrote the rules of software releases. They’ve re-invented their core product, which is pretty unprecedented for software companies, and married two models of software development, old and new. Now that’s exciting
In the chattiest Apple’s been about the iPad trademark mess it’s in in Mainland China it said Tuesday that the financially squeezed Shenzhen Proview Technology, which claims to still own the mark there, insisted on selling the IP in 2009 through its Taiwan affiliate so its many creditors wouldn’t know it got the money. Apple claims it was snookered into dealing with the Taiwan subsidiary, which represented that it controlled two iPad marks in China even though they technically belong to Proview Shenzhen.
A Dutch court Wednesday told Samsung it couldn’t have an injunction against Apple’s iPhone 4s based on patents it pledged to ETSI and 3G/UMTS standards. Not when Apple is willing to license them on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. It especially can’t have an injunction or otherwise call Apple to account because it’s already getting paid by Qualcomm for the patents; Apple’s just buying covered baseband chips from Qualcomm; it’s covered by extension. Samsung’s trick of terminating its Qualcomm agreement as far as Apple goes didn’t work in Holland because the widgetry was irrevocably pledged to ETSI.
For some reason that isn’t clear, Apple and Motorola Mobility took a shot at negotiating a cross-license that might have covered all the Android OEMs late last year. So says the European Commission’s decision to clear the Google-MMI merger that Bloomberg pointed to Monday. The 38-page document indicates that Apple demanded what the EC called “carve-outs,” and FOSS Patents thinks that means exclusions on any portfolio-wide cross-license so Apple can keep its special distinguishing features to itself.
In a time where the clock speeds of processors have been stable over the past couple of years, and Moore's Law is instead being applied by increasing the number of processor cores, it is getting more important for applications to use concurrent processing to reduce run/response times, as the time slicing routine via increased clock speed will no longer be available to bail out slow running programs. Carl Hewitt proposed the Actor Model in 1973 as a way to implement unbounded nondeterminism in concurrent processing. In many ways this model was influenced by the packet switching mechanism, for example, no synchronous handshake between sender and receiver, inherently concurrent message passing, messages may not arrive in the order they were sent, addresses are stored in messages, etc.
The District Court for the Northern District of California Tuesday scheduled the Android trial weighing Oracle's infringement claims against Google for April 16. It should run eight glorious weeks. Google wanted the trial to wait until fall as originally scheduled. So Oracle got what it wanted. But on Wednesday Google's lead counsel asked for a continuance, saying he and others on Google's legal team will be occupied elsewhere and wants the trial delayed until after June 29 or at least until April 30. Of course, the judge was aware of the scheduling conflict so it might not make any difference. According to patent wars observer FOSS Patents he told Google a few hours later that the prospects of any formal motion to delay "are not great." It appears that behind the scenes he's been coordinating with other district court judges to reschedule the trials demanding the presence of Google's lead counsel et al elsewhere.
The Mac Blogosphere has the new iPad going on sale in retail stores at 8am Friday morning March 16. 9to5Mac has got pictures of some Apple signage showing the time.
A new era of Business Intelligence is unfolding with users buying and deploying BI either with or without cooperation from IT. Because of this shift, users now have many choices and need to make the best decision when it comes to BI features, functionality and price. Stay up to date on the ever-changing BI market by reviewing the findings of the 2011 Dresner Advisory Services Wisdom of Crowds BI Market Study™. Howard Dresner, report author and worldwide authority on BI, shares the latest market trends and provides true insight in to what is happening in the BI arena today. In addition, read why Actuate/BIRT is in the top position and how it exceeded its peer group and the overall sample average for all Technical Support and Product metrics by a wide margin.
View this demo for an introduction to BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools), the powerful open source report and Rich Information Application development environment, used by over one million developers. BIRT can be used to create compelling business intelligence and reporting applications that present data to users in a very simple, user friendly and intelligent way via the web on any device. Watch now to: See how simple it is to create interactive reports, ad-hoc queries and dynamic dashboards Learn how to create information-driven content based on a wide variety of sources, including your application, live feeds and legacy data Discover how to reduce the reliance on IT and improve user self-service capabilities
I've been neglecting my blog, but just a quick note to mention that my latest talk at JavaOne, DSLs with Groovy, is posted up on Slideshare.
The talk's designed for someone with no significant Groovy experience (unlike most Groovy DSL talks), so if it's interesting to you, check it out.
I'm hoping (but not promising) to turn the talk into a series of Blog entries in the coming weeks. So if you want, just wait, and I'll send you explanations in more digestible bits and pieces in the coming weeks.
(As usual, this entry is cross posted to my main blog site.)
Any application you pick up, there are some issues – big or small. There will be copy-paste code, mistakes, algorithms which could have better thought through. But what distinguishes an antipattern from these normal errors is that like patterns these antipatterns are recurring throughout the code base. In my recent experience in dealing with performance issues, I had observed certain recurrent themes that are undermining the overall application performance. Most of these antipatterns are well documented but it seems we do not learn from others mistakes. We need to make our own mistakes. I am recounting some of the common patterns that I observed in the recent months.
Under legal pressure from Los Angeles-based RPost, Swiss Post says it has dropped proof-of-delivery functionality from its IncaMail secure e-mail service, a move that leaves the critical widgetry in a pickle. To deliver official documents – like IncaMail’s been doing – it has to be certified by the Swiss government, and to be certified by the government a delivery service has got to provide a receipt that proves the message was delivered. IncaMail got its Swiss Federal Strategy Unit for IT (FSUIT) certification before it reportedly changed the service in response to an RPost patent infringement suit in Switzerland. After months of hemming and hawing, trying to redefine “delivery,” Swiss Post has told the Swiss court hearing the case that IncaMail no longer provides proof of delivery, nor would it in the future.
The build vs. buy debate for integration stacks continues unabated. Robin Smith from Virtual Logistics interviews Hollis Tibbetts to get to the bottom of this important issue. I had a great phone conversation with (SaaS Integration pioneer) Boomi founder Rick Nucci about a month ago on the build vs. buy topic - specifically why some continue to believe that building their own integration middleware stack is a good idea, despite the mountains of evidence that it makes no sense to do so. For the most part, nobody today thinks about building their own Relational Database (I remember when that was not the case) - yet people persist in wanting to build their own integration stacks.
Its lawyers having wracked up mixed results seeking injunctions, Apple is supposedly ready to go back on its late chief Steve Jobs’ blood oath to wage “thermonuclear war” on Android for copying Apple’s widgetry and settle some of the legion of infringement suits it has filed against Android pushers. Quoting “people familiar with the matter,” the Wall Street Journal says Apple has made overtures to Samsung and Motorola Mobility, offering to license at least some of the patents they need to compete for the price of a royalty. The paper suggests there are “other terms” without saying what they may be.
OpenStack has gone into beta running tens of thousands of instances. Meanwhile Amazon, its target of opportunity, has “significantly” cut prices on EC2, its Relational Database Service (RDS), ElastiCache and Elastic Map Reduce, both on-demand and Reserved Instances, claiming it has nothing to do with competitive pressures. Amazon attributes its largesse to economies of scale, its supply chain and its DNA. Exactly how much a user can expect to save depends on the regions used and how big the instances are.
It was just a matter of time before this elephant stomped into the room. The big Chinese banks that Proview Technology Shezhen – the Chinese company that claims to own the iPad trademark – owes a pot full of money to claim they relieved Proview of the Chinese rights to the mark in early 2009 when they seized its assets. That was nine months before Apple says it bought the trademark off a supposedly authorized Proview (Taiwan). This message comes from a consulting company called Hejun Vanguard Group that claimed to speak for the banks in an e-mail to press.
US Circuit Court Judge Richard Posner, probably America’s most eminent jurist, ordered Google and Motorola Mobility to turn over information Apple has been seeking about Google’s acquisition of Android Inc, the development of the Android operating system and the pending $12.5 billion Google-MMI merger. His order Monday reads, “Motorola shall be expected to obtain full and immediate compliance by Google with Apple’s liability discovery demands.” The discovery is supposed to help Apple calculate damages. As you might expect, MMI resisted Apple’s laundry list of demands, arguing that Google isn’t party to the lawsuit and can’t be compelled to turn over documents. It will probably put up further resistance but FOSS Patents figures it’s possible Apple might find a smoking gun even if the broad discovery it’s been granted is curtailed.
Hours before Apple introduced its new third-generation iPad Wednesday Samsung said it filed a new suit in South Korea charging the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 with trifling with three of its patents. Samsung told the Korea Times there would be “no compromise” with its single largest customer. That was after the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Apple had offered Samsung a license for $5-$15 a device (more of this anon). And to kinda prove Samsung’s point, the Korea Times said that Samsung has upped the budget for its worldwide court battle with Apple from $200 million to $260 million. Anyway, Reuters says the new charges relate to the way data is displayed, the user interface and short text messages.
As you start to scale a software development process it becomes apparent that code and user stories have to be merged more frequently. Sometimes changes may flow from one organization to another. This means that you will need to take code from one team, merge, integrate and test those changes with everyone.
Webpage performance Web page performance as opposed to website performance is a bit more of an intricate job requiring familiarization with what is actually served on your website and how your web pages are woven together.
We know everything about the new iPad but the name. After Wednesday’s hour-plus-long launch event in San Francisco, Apple CEO Tim Cookies and team unveiled details about the company’s new tablet, simply calling it the “new iPad” throughout.