These past few weeks, I published several blogs pointing out problems with static rule based correlation, their current limitations, their high TCO, etc. Because these solutions have been sold for many years as the end all be all to security problems, it has created false expectations in the industry and among clients. But SIEM as a general discipline holds plenty of promises, let’s not throw the baby with the bathwater.
cVidya Networks, a provider of Revenue Intelligence solutions for Telecom, Media and Entertainment service providers, has announced the release of DRMap, a complete data retention solution that enables CSPs to comply with current regulations and swiftly fulfill law enforcement requests. With its current positioning in the revenue assurance and fraud management spaces, cVidya was able to leverage its capabilities to create a solution which by nature collects richer sets of information as part of existing applications deployed at CSPs. With the necessity to ensure compliance with increasing regulations, such as the EU Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC requiring CSPs to store data for up to 24 months, it is imperative that CSPs have fast, secure, and compliant data retention systems. According to a leading research firm white paper, the majority of CSPs are spending a lot of time and money trying to adapt their current systems to meet the regulations. cVidya is leveraging Oracle Exadata Database Machine, allowing CSPs to benefit from the extreme performance, speed and scalability offered by Oracle. cVidya's DRMap V1.0 has also achieved Oracle Exadata Ready status through Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). This demonstrates that cVidya has fully tested and supports DRMap V1.0 on Oracle Exadata Database Machine.
DS Data Systems UK Ltd. is pleased to announce the release of KonaKart v6.0.0.0, a Java-based eCommerce shopping cart application that provides an extensive set of features to enable retailers to successfully sell their products over the internet. KonaKart is a Java / JSP / XML based solution with comprehensive easy to use java, SOAP, RMI and JSON APIs that allow you to quickly integrate eCommerce functionality into your existing systems. The customizable parts of KonaKart are Open Source and available under the GNU LGPL.
This article introduces the concepts of Component Oriented Development and Assembly (CODA) using the OSGi Service platform with an example application. The article starts with an introduction to software components, elaborates with an example application, followed by an overview of the OSGi Service platform, and an implementation of the example application using this platform. Components are parts that can be assembled to form a larger system. Electronic components such as ICs (Integrated Circuits) are assembled together to build an electronic system; similarly software components are assembled together to build a software system. Software systems have a static form as well as a dynamic runtime form. Software components can be assembled either in static form or dynamic form. In either case, the software component is an independent unit of development, deployment, and assembly. Using components to build software systems will provide many architectural advantages apart from promoting ease of reuse.
EMC CEO Joe Tucci is gonna keep his eventual replacement waiting a while longer. When the company posted pretty Q4 results the other day Tucci said he won’t be stepping down this year as planned. He said the board asked him to stay into 2013 and that “after much soul-searching” he agreed. “As I’ve said in the past, the board and I fully expect that my successor will come from within the existing, talented and experienced ranks of the EMC management team” – who reportedly all asked him to reconsider his transition plans.
As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It would allow organizations to have a cloud at various data centers instead of one cloud at one datacenter. Costs are reduced significantly since one big Internet pipe is not needed.
Joyent’s SmartDataCenter IaaS platform is going to be sold to Italian VARs and service providers by ICOS, an Italian value-added distributor, for private cloud infrastructure or value-added private cloud services. SmartDataCenter’s local storage is supposed to reduce the TCO of cloud data centers. It’s designed to manage tens of thousands of virtual machines, a k a SmartMachines, and supports a multi-tenant PaaS. ICOS means to develop its own cloud infrastructure for channel partners too so they don’t have to build their own cloud data center. JoyentCloud.com delivers public cloud services to LinkedIn, Gilt Groupe and Kabam and licenses its cloud software to service providers that include Dell, FirstServer, XYBase, ClusterTech and Uniserve. Its offerings include a Platform-as-a-Service based on Node.js, the open source server-side JavaScript development environment that’s been embraced by Microsoft.
When it comes to procurement, any technology or service should be evaluated with a good set of criteria. Executive decisions should not be weighted solely on a single selection criterion such as price. This applies to any cloud computing service as well. The twelve criteria listed below (see Chart 1) forces executives to take a broader review of the many elements of the total cloud computing service, and not just price. Each criteria starts with an R, F, or P which makes it easy to remember the total framework for the Yardstick for Technology Procurement (RFP).
SYS-CON Events announced today that CodeFutures Corporation, the company behind dbShards, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. CodeFutures Corporation, the company behind dbShards, is a leading supplier of database performance and reliability tools that reduce the time and effort required to dramatically increase database scalability and performance. With dbShards, production environments gain scalability, high-availability and easy management of multi-terabyte databases through its Continuous Replication technology, providing an ideal foundation for fast-growing, 24X7 applications.
Amazon’s cloud, which, let’s face it, is still pretty much developer turf, broadened its push into the enterprise Wednesday with the introduction of AWS Storage Gateway, a beta virtual appliance nominally meant to automate enterprise data backup to S3 while creating a comfort level with the cloud among the leery. It’s the first time Amazon has proposed putting its own software on the ground inside a corporate data center. And the stuff’s targeted at large corporations. Amazon says some customers asked for such a solution. It also expects resellers to offer the service. It is of course proprietary and a competitive problem for other cloud storage and gateway suppliers. Come to think of it, Amazon as repository of corporate data is a problem for a lot of people.
Apple has taken the International Trade Commission’s month-old decision finding HTC’s Android gismos infringe only one of the patents it asserted and letting it ship the products while it fixes the problem to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC). The patent-watching Foss Patents blog says Apple quietly lodged the appeal on December 29. The blog learned from an Apple filing with the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in a case against Motorola Mobility that the ITC’s administrative law judge had sided with Apple and found HTC guilty of infringing Apple’s US 6,343,263 real-time API patent but that that decision had been overturned by the ITC’s panel of six commissioners.
The focus of Java EE 7 is on the cloud, and specifically it aims to bring Platform-as-a-Service providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, etc. The existing specifications in the platform such as JPA, Servlets, EJB, and others will be updated to meet these requirements. Java EE 7 continues the ease of development push that characterized prior releases by bringing further simplification to enterprise development. It also adds new, important APIs such as the REST client API in JAX-RS 2.0 and the long awaited Concurrency Utilities for Java EE API. Expression Language 3.0 and Java Message Service 2.0 will undergo an extreme makeover to align with the improvements in the Java language. There are plenty of improvements to several other components. Newer web standards like HTML 5 and Web Sockets will be embraced to build modern web applications.
Yesterday’s announcement of Apple’s fourth quarter result for 2011 was astounding to say the least. Growth from a year-ago quarter was 118%. Sales for the quarter at $46.3 Billion yielded profit of $13.1B. Wow – that profit is more than 3 times what General Electric earned in its most recent quarter. These figures blew analysts’ projections. Apple’s cash hoard is $97.6B, more than the market capitalizations of all but 52 publicly traded companies.
Motorola Mobility and its puppet master Google are going to try to get the iPhone 4S and iCloud enjoined in the United States. The pair moved on the very day that Apple hit the ball so far out of the park they’re still looking for it after it announced it sold a record 37 million iPhones last quarter, described iCloud as the “strategy for the next decade, not a product,” and was lauded as the most valuable property on earth.
Nearly every web application that interacts with a user is faced with the dilemma of how to best support tablets and mobile devices. As entrepreneurs we can no longer put off supporting these platforms as a nice to have. The demand that is created by iPad users and the influx of Android tablets in the marketplace is significant especially for early stage companies. Zoomstra is no different and we are currently facing our biggest technology decision yet. What is our best option for supporting tablets?
A Dutch appeals court Tuesday rejected an injunction-seeking Apple bid to overturn a lower court’s decision last August that Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 isn’t a copy of the Apple iPad and doesn’t infringe Apple’s design rights. Apple was also denied a preliminary injunction in the United States on a design-related patent equivalent to its European Community Design IP and is appealing the decision. FOSS Patents says the Dutch appeals court, like the US district court, narrowed the scope of the Apple IP based on prior art and so came to its conclusion. Apple got a preliminary injunction in Germany using the design IP last summer, a decision a German appeals court could lift for the same reason next week. Last Tuesday Apple filed two more design-related suits against Samsung phones and tablets in Germany but didn’t ask for injunctions.
Apple crushed all expectations for its December quarter when it reported its results Tuesday. It earned $13.06 billion, or $13.87 a share, on revenues of $46.3 billion. That’s up from up from a mere $6 billion, or $6.43 a share, on $26.74 billion last year. The best Wall Street thought it would do was $10.10 on $38.9 billion. Not only that but it guided higher than Wall Street estimates. The usually hyper-conservative Apple said it figures it’ll do about $32.5 billion this quarter and realize earnings per share of about $8.50. Expectations were for $32.1 billion, returning $8.04. Its stock tore through a record $450 after-hours, up ~8%. During the December quarter Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones, up 128% year-over-year, 15.43 million iPads, up 111%, 5.2 million Macs, up 26% while PCs linger in the doldrums, and even 15.4 million iPods, down 21%. Wall Street figured it would sell 30.2 million iPhones, 13.8 million iPads, 13.6 million iPods and 5.16 million Macs. Needless to say Apple is “thrilled.” Its gross margin was 44.7% compared to 38.5% a year ago, international sales accounted for 58% of revenue, Apple retail stores posted sales of $17.1 million, up 37%, and there are now 315 million iOS devices floating around out there. The revenue Apple saw from that little sleeper, the iPhone 4S, originally written off as not different enough from the iPhone 4, more than double to $24.4 billion. At the end of the quarter there were less than six million iPhones left in channel inventory, Apple said during its conference call. Seems the phone’s better camera, faster microprocessor and Siri virtual assistant that answers voice commands worked. The widget, which is now compatible with the networks of most of the Fortune 500, didn’t start shipping in China, where demands is “staggering,” according to CEO Tim Cook, until this month. Globally the thing’s got 130,000 points of sale. Besides the $199 4S Apple also cut the older iPhone 4 to $99 and made the iPhone 3GS free with contracts through wireless carriers. Whatever Apple’s doing Android’s lead has narrowed. Revenue from the iPad doubled to $9.1 billion, leaving four-six weeks worth of inventory unsold. Cook said most of the Fortune 500 are “actively using” the thing. After looking at the data Cook figures Apple was unaffected by Amazon’s introduction of the cheap $199 Kindle Fire. Apple’s got 170,000 apps; at the most, he said, the competition’s got a few hundred and what it takes to stave off any competition. He’s tickled that Apple has sold 55 million iPads in 21 months. But Cook claims the tablet will eventually be bigger than the PC and that there are already indications in US that will happen. The usually slow-to-react K-12 education sector bought two times more iPads than Macs last quarter. Cook said the component environment, other than hard drives, is favorable. The HDD shortages in the December quarter didn’t materially affect Apple and won’t this quarter either although it expects to pay higher prices. Cook said iCloud, which he described as a “strategy for the next decade, not a product,” has 85 million accounts. Naturally Wall Street was hot to know what Apple is going to do about the $100 billion cash pile it’s run up. Cook would only say that the company is in “active discussions” about what to do with it and aside from declaring a dividend –unfashionable with so-called growth stocks – or doing a stock buy-back, it was thinking about acquisitions and investments in the supply chain. He would not give a date for a decision. He said the money’s “not burning a hole in our pocket.” It is with stockholders. Despite Apple’s optimism about this quarter the numbers still suggest a steeper sequential decline than usual. Among other things this quarter is only 13 weeks. The blow-out quarter was 14 weeks. As usual Apple claims it’s got “some amazing new products in the pipeline.”
Project Insight allows the dispersed project team at Armada's prevention, preparedness, response and recovery solutions to access their projects from any location. Project and portfolio management software, Project Insight helps the project team at Armada Ltd. manage its projects more effectively. Armada Ltd. is a world class provider of prevention, preparedness, response and recovery solutions for both public and private sector clients. Project Insight's online project software allows the dispersed project team at Armada to access their projects from any location. Before Project Insight, the project team at Armada used an in-house project management system; however, as the company expanded, they outgrew that solution. As a significant portion of their employees work from remote home offices, it was mission critical for all project information to be accessible online. The organization also needed a good way to track and report on time at a very detailed level. The Chief Operating Officer (COO) decided to find a more robust project and portfolio solution.
HP has named Bill Veghte its chief strategy officer, replacing CTO Shane Robison who was ousted three months ago. Veghte, who used to run the $15 billion Windows unit at Microsoft, joined HP in 2010 as head of software, a job he will keep. He is also supposed to head HP’s cloud and webOS open source initiatives. HP said that as chief strategy officer, Veghte’s supposed to “help define the IT industry’s future and make certain HP continues to lead the way,” adding that his “new role reaffirms HP’s commitment to providing customers with the latest platforms, products and services needed for success in a rapidly changing world.”
A rare, if not unheard of, confluence of stars Thursday meant that IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Google all reported their calendar Q4 numbers after the market closed. Of the lot only Google came a cropper, losing $57 after-hours, down 8.9% when last we looked to $582.58, on a scary drop in its search advertising. Paid clicks were down 8% while costs were up 35%. Earnings were up 6.3% but that still counted as a miss by Wall Street’s lights. Google was supposed to return $10.49 a share on revenues of $8.41 billion. Instead it did $8.22 on record-breaking $10.58 billion, up 25%, which worked out to $8.13 billion after paying commissions. The reaction may, in part, be a way to punish Google for buying Motorola Mobility, which delivered a disappointing quarter on January 6 on depressed device sales. The purchase, if regulators wave it through, will likely play havoc with Google’s income statement.
Amazon has started offering Windows Server instances on its Free Usage Tier. AWS positions the move as helping new customers get started in the cloud. They can run, test or develop Windows apps, host a web site or do all of those things and not be locked into a particular operating system. Amazon’s free widgetry has previously been limited to Linux instances. Now it says it’s “fine-tuned the micro instances to make them even better at running Microsoft Windows Server.” Presumably Microsoft would prefer the exposure happen on its Windows Azure PaaS, which is incredibly supposed to add Linux sometime this year.
The first OpenStack-based cloud operating system came out Wednesday. The start-up Piston Cloud Computing Inc delivered the thing, which makes sense since Piston’s founders were instrumental in OpenStack, which is a framework, not a product. The widgetry is called Piston Enterprise OS or pentOS for short and it will sell for $3,500 a server a year, a price that includes 24/7 telephone support. Piston co-founder and CEO Joshua McKenty said Piston sold maybe 10 of the things ahead of general availability and the code was destined for big iron $250,000 hardware installations. People apparently just bought it after seeing the demo at Cloud Expo. Nothing is in production yet.
Enterprises AND software companies seeking competitive advantage through IT innovation should be aware of this technology shift and actively defining strategies for capitalizing on it. The principles behind Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) were established long before the Internet became a force, and certainly before the appearance of Cloud infrastructure. Although many people consider SOA as well as Cloud to all about ways of building, deploying and managing applications, these technologies and methodologies are also important in making "big data" useful and manageable. Indeed, SOA and Cloud are increasingly becoming so intertwined as to cause major confusion in the marketplace. Let's be clear - there's SOA, and there's Cloud and there's the intersection of SOA and Cloud. That intersection is a very exciting place to be. I remember long discussions on things like CICS which embodied many of the principals behind SOA, and I'm sure there are technologies (and methodologies) older than that which similarly embody various principals of Cloud as well as SOA). Like so many things in this industry, the more things change, the more they seem strangely (though never entirely) similar. I suppose that's evolution for you.
Microsoft staged a Private Cloud Day Tuesday to herald the coming of System Center 2012 sometime between now and the end of June. System Center 2012 will put Microsoft squarely in the private cloud business and put VMware’s teeth on edge because it’s cheaper and reportedly has the same bells and whistles as VMware’s widgetry. According to IDC VMware will have to start competing on price. Once Microsoft’s private cloudware is out there it’ll have the makings of a hybrid model – which is what most people say they want – governed by the same management tools and offering a consistent view of application performance and data in both environments. Microsoft, by the way, says it recognizes that users want to consume cloud capacity from a number of partners.
The US International Trade Commission decided on Friday the 13th that Motorola Mobility’s Android-bearing smartphones don’t infringe the three Apple patents Apple claims they infringe. The decision by one of the agency’s administrative law judges is called preliminary because Apple is likely to insist that it be reviewed by ITC’s panel of six commissioners by May 14. FOSS Patents blogger Florian Mueller says one of the patents is “essential to Apple’s litigation strategy” and that’s US Patent No 7,663,607, the broadest touchscreen hardware patent Apple has. It used it to get Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 briefly outlawed in Australia. Mueller says the MMI decision might “adversely affect Apple’s lawsuits against Samsung in which the multipoint touchscreen patent is being asserted.” An initial decision on MMI’s ITC complaint charging Apple with infringing 18 of its patents is due April 23.