SAP said Tuesday that it’s buying Crossgate, a Munich-based hosted B2B integration house that makes it possible for companies to integrate and network with trading partners, clients and suppliers and do electronic data exchanges with any business partner regardless of its technical skills. Terms were not disclosed. Apparently Crossgate has helped 40,000 business partners in various industries exchange documents and data. Its service eliminates costly point-to-point integration. It’s also got e-invoicing services covering the entire process of inbound and outbound invoices, including signatures and compliance monitoring, which integrate with customers’ back-end systems and finance processes.
A couple of weeks ago, I dropped by the Intel Developer Forum to present a session and listen in on a few others. As always in these types of shows, I learned quite a bit. Most strikingly though, I was reminded of something that is probably quite obvious to many of you: Consumer interest in cloud computing will not be letting up any time soon. Based on this, and some of the other things I heard at the show, I decided to catch up with fellow IBMer Marc Haberkorn. Marc is an IBM Product Manager and is responsible for IBM Workload Deployer amongst other things. I asked him about IBM Workload Deployer, the competition, and cloud in general.
From time to time in JSF and ADF Faces RC applications there’s the need from one managed bean to retrieve another, typically from a lesser scoped bean to a greater, such as a requestScope bean retrieving a sessionScope bean to access its methods. There’s essentially 3 avenues to solving this problem. With these 3 approaches in mind it’s interesting to gather some statistics on how long it takes each method to retrieve each type of bean. The following chart shows 5 consecutive runs of each method, per bean type, where each method is repeated in a loop 10000 times (so we can see the statistical differences).
Oracle narrowly vaulted Wall Street’s expectations Tuesday when it reported its first fiscal quarter. Its results encouraged people to think budgets aren’t in lockdown mode. Revenues were up 12% to $8.37 billion returning a non-GAAP EPS of 48 cents a share, up 14%, against estimates of 46 cents on $8.35 billion. On a GAAP basis EPS was 36 cents, up 36%, for a total net of $1.84 billion. Although there were no large deals, new software license revenues, a key metric, were up 17% to $1.5 billion. Analysts had predicted a 15% rise. The company’s all-important software license updates and product support revenues were also up 17% to $4 billion. Oracle co-president Safra Catz claimed “company-specific momentum.” Despite the turmoil over there, European sales were up 60% in the quarter, an important number because Oracle gets 30% of its revenue from Europe. However, hardware sales slouched 5% to $1 billion. Oracle still has faith though; it said it hired 350 salespeople in the quarter. In a statement co-president Mark Hurd said, “Our high-end server business – Exadata, Exalogic and Sparc M-Series – delivered solid double-digit revenue growth in Q1. In contrast, revenue declined in our low-end server business. By moving away from low-margin commodity hardware and focusing on high-end servers, we increased our hardware gross margins from 48% to 54%. Our strategy to grow the profitable parts of our hardware business is paying off.” That means selling widgetry that’s based solely on Oracle IP and that won’t happen until fiscal year 2013, according to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, when hardware should start showing top-line growth. Meantime, he said, he doesn’t care if “our commodity x86 business goes to zero.” Oracle’s not making any money selling other people’s IP. He did not address Sun’s server losses to competitors. In a step towards Ellison’s nirvana Oracle next week is supposed to announce a new high-performance Sparc microprocessor and a new high-end, Solaris 11-run, fault-tolerant server called a Sparc SuperCluster. Ellison said the new Sparc T4 chip is up to five times faster than the T3 part it replaces, and the new all-Oracle SuperCluster, engineered to use the T4 along with Exadata’s flash and disk storage system, is supposed to be cheaper and faster than anything IBM’s got. It’ll apparently do data analysis in-memory. Evidently Oracle is about to put out three other purely Oracle “engineered systems” at OpenWorld in a couple of weeks. The issue of unstructured data came up during the conference call, which gave Larry the chance to take out his switch blade and go for HP. He said Autonomy, the unstructured data company HP is buying, was shopped to Oracle and he was “shocked” by HP’s “absurdly high” bid of $10.25 billion for the British software company. He then explained that the Oracle Database hadn’t been simply an RDBMS for 20 years and had absorbed object database methodology when it came along, then text search and XML, and now it’s supposed to integrate unstructured data too and process it as well as Autonomy. For its next trick the database will interface with anybody’s Hadoop appliance and process the Big Data that Hadoop feeds it. After starting the widgetry six years ago Oracle is supposed to go GA with its Fusion apps by Christmas. Evidently Fusion already has 200 customers. Oracle is also going to start pushing CRM cloud apps (SaaS stuff like Salesforce) this quarter. Oracle shares were tickled 3% after-hours after falling 2.3% during the day. It closed at $28.35. Nothing was said during the conference call about the court-ordered negotiations Ellison had Monday and Tuesday with Google CEO Larry Page to resolve Oracle’s Java infringement suit. Oracle guided to non-GAAP revenues up 4%-8% to $9 billion-$9.34 billion this quarter on new software license revenue up 6%-16% and hardware flat to down 5%. Non-GAAP profits should be 56 cents-58 cents a share. The Street figured revenues at $9.36 billion.
Oracle wants to appeal a district court’s decision to cut a jury’s award of $1.3 billion in damages against SAP down to $272 million to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The federal judge who overturned the record award claiming it was “grossly excessive” and unsupported by the evidence doesn’t want Oracle to appeal. She’s asked the company to reconsider its request to go over her head. She’s already ruled that SAP would get a new trial just on the damages if Oracle rejected the $272 million payment for copyright infringement. SAP has admitted its defunct subsidiary TomorrowNow’s ransacked Oracle’s IP and illegally downloaded scads of Oracle software.
It’s a scenario with which many Java developers are all too familiar – and one which many fear. You log on to the network or arrive at the office to discover your Chief Security or Compliance Officer, Application Manager or even a VP of Sales and Marketing in a state of panic. A commonly used open source component has a serious security vulnerability that may expose your client-facing applications to attack. Even worse, the flaw was identified a few weeks ago, but your organization has just heard about it. The questions and accusations fly: “Why are we using open source components for our critical business applications?!” “Why don’t we just rip out this component and replace it with something more secure?” “Do you have any idea what will happen if people discover that our applications have a security flaw?!” “This could negatively impact revenue and our reputation!” And, of course, “What are you going to do to fix this – and ensure it never happens again?!”
Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder upgrades with brand-new UI and very cool new features. Brand-new attractive UI Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder got a new and very attractive UI. You can see how it looks below but the best way to experience it, is to log in or sign up. You will like it. Upgraded export-and-build capability with support for Android, iOS, and mobile Web That’s big one. From the screen shot you can see that it’s now super easy to get the source code and build for Android and get the source code for iOS.
Platfora, a Hadoop analytics start-up, has gotten $5.7 million in Series A money from Andreessen Horowitz and the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel. The fledging is trying to make pretty, understandable graphs out of big petabytes-size Hadoop data. Its product, which will compete with Datameer’s, won’t be available until next year. It says Hadoop lacks the interactivity and sophisticated reporting capabilities needed by business users. It’s aiming to work with existing Hadoop clusters, including Cloudera, MapR and Amazon EMR, among others, and automatically turn the questions business users pose into dimensional and predictive dashboards, reports and insights.
After Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin reached out to Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha in early July about the Nortel patents Google had just lost to a dangerous rival, Google wound up bidding $30 a share for the whole company on August 1. MMI was supposedly afraid it would be defenseless without its 17,000 patents. Advised by Frank Quattrone’s indomitable Qatalst Partners, it wanted $43.50 a share. Google went to $37. MMI dropped to $40.50, according to an SEC filing, and settled for 40 bucks a share, a tidy $12.5 billion and a 63% premium, $10 to maybe $15 more than MMI’s board originally thought it could get. Google shelled out $3 billion or 33% more than its initial offer in the absence of any rivals.
It’s maybe a year before any Windows 8 products come out but Microsoft started pushing what it called its “re-imagined,” next-generation operating system to developers this week at its Build conference in California. Evidently it’s trying to freeze the market before its PC empire is utterly chipped away by the upstart Apple and Android. Microsoft is supposed to be “re-imagining” all its widgetry “from the chipset to the user experience” to run on or through the cloud, an exercise that’s supposed to equate to re-imagining Microsoft itself while Windows remains at its core and every business is cloud-optimized and tied together. Backward-compatible with Windows 7, on which it is based but requiring less memory, Windows 8 is both a leap into OS-disenfranchising cloud services and a tablet catch-up – at least for ARM tablets. It made no firm promises about Intel tablets but reassured the crowd that the highly rated ARM development is keeping pace with its Intel development although Microsoft didn’t show it.
When technologies turn obsolete and paradigms shift, what happens to the jobs that support them? Do they disappear into…the cloud? The world of IT is in perpetual motion, which means every job is potentially endangered. But even so, cloud computing has gotten many people spooked, and with good reason. This is a big change. Many in IT talk about being in business more than technology, but cloud computing makes that shift more real than ever. With the cloud hovering overhead, many specific aspects of IT must evolve or they will become extinct. Here’s the bottom line: with the shift to cloud computing, the IT department must hone a new set of skills – such as managing a broader set of service provider partners – in order to deliver hybrid cloud services to the business. In this new IT reality, business services become equally – if not more important – than technical minutiae. Vendor comparison, decision-making and management become a primary responsibility. IT folks need to shift, or risk being shifted themselves.
IDC has joined Gartner in clipping its projections for global PC growth this year. It figures the number of widgets shipped will only be up 2.8%, down from a previous forecast of 4.2%, citing tablet cannibalization, cautious spending by SMBs and consumers and saturated mature markets coupled with the lack of sexy new features and the uncertainty HP’s proposed spin-off of its PC business has inflicted on the market. IDC also cut its 2012 growth guidance from 10.2% to 9.3%. It still thinks 2013-2015 is good for growth of 11% a year because of replacements and rising penetration in emerging markets.
After Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin reached out to Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha in early July about the Nortel patents Google had just lost to a dangerous rival, Google wound up bidding $30 a share for the whole company on August 1. MMI was supposedly afraid it would be defenseless without its 17,000 patents. Advised by Frank Quattrone’s indomitable Qatalst Partners, it wanted $43.50 a share. Google went to $37. MMI dropped to $40.50, according to an SEC filing, and settled for 40 bucks a share, a tidy $12.5 billion and a 63% premium, $10 to maybe $15 more than MMI’s board originally thought it could get. Google shelled out $3 billion or 33% more than its initial offer in the absence of any rivals.
I always get excited when I see another person questioning the use of frameworks that ask you to either replace one language with another or write additional code as a life support to sustain the framework’s functioning. This time my kudos to Christin Gorman, who did a great job explaining why using the Hibernate framework over SQL is a bad choice. Watch this video , where Christin uses the Cake Mix metaphor to deliver her message loud and clear. In the past I was using a different metaphors. One was about the goat and rabbi. The other one is about the Axe Soup a.k.a. Stone Soup. I remember this story about a soldier returning back from war. He was very hungry, and, when reached some village, he asked a women living there to give him some food. She rejected. Then he asked for a pot of water so he could cook a soup form his axe. She became curious and agreed. After placing the axe in a boiling water he asked if she had just one small potato to add some flavor to the Axe Soup. She gave the potato. Than he asked the woman about a small onion, and on and on and on. When the soup was ready, he removed the axe from the pot and fed himself with a tasteful soup.
Are you familiar with the words “Intrapreneur” or “Intrapreneurship”? According to Wikipedia: Intrapreneur = A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation. Intrapreneurship = The practice of a corporate management style that integrates risk-taking and innovation approaches, as well as the reward and motivational techniques, that are more traditionally thought of as being the province of entrepreneurship.
Google has bought what appears to be another 1,023 patents from IBM, a transfer recorded by the US Patent and Trademark Office Wednesday and noticed by Bloomberg, which said Google bought them on August 17. The PTO also transferred 1,030 patents from IBM to Google in July after Google lost the auction for 6,000-odd Nortel patents to the combined might of Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Ericsson, Sony and EMC and their $4.5 billion. The blog SEO by the Sea flipped through the latest IBM haul and says the batch includes a bunch of Java and scripting-based patents. Whether any of them can defuse Oracle’s massive Java infringement suit against Google and its Android operating system is unclear.
In the last post , we finished our first user story. That user story was pretty simple, but it flushed out the design of our home page. The next user story, As an administrator, I want to invite users to Loccasions is not quite so simple. The implications from this user story are big: First, we have a new role, administrator, which brings our roles to two (unregistered user and administrator).
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In understanding the scalability challenge addressed by WebSphere eXtreme Scale, let us first define and understand scalability. Wikipedia defines scalability as a "desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged. For example, it can refer to the capability of a system to increase total throughput under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added."
By caching strategically at many tiers, we are trying to offload processing to various tiers and ONLY dedicating processing in middleware when it is most important or the ‘window shoppers’ now mean business. We will dedicate our cycles to those business meaning clients and service them better with an enhanced experience. As business grows so does the resulting infrastructure and primarily the middleware which houses the business logic and in some cases this tier shares the presentation or the store front with business logic. So with growth in business either due to larger client base or new business model implies similar growth in middleware. This consistent growth poses a few challenges some obvious ones include costs – not only of software but also hosting infrastructure and hardware. Some non obvious challenges include manageability of platform i.e. general administration, handling performance and Service level agreement (SLA) and addressing scalability.
WebSphere eXtreme Scale can be used in different ways. It can be used as a very powerful cache or as a form of an in-memory database processing space to manage application state or as a platform for building powerful Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP) applications.
Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal last Friday ordered Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Google CEO Larry Page to sit down next Monday and Tuesday and seek a financial settlement to Oracle’s Java infringement suit against Google. If they get nowhere next week they’ll have to show up for one more try on Friday, September 30. It’s still unclear whether the Java jury trial will start as scheduled on October 31. It all depends on whether an unrelated criminal case gets precedence. The Java case was recently divided in two: a liability part and a damages part. Judge Grewal, who will try to mediate, issued his Larrys order after Oracle railed against Google’s idea of sending Android chief Andy Rubin to a sit-down. Oracle sees Rubin as the author of the infringement and it’s got internal Google e-mail –one of the e-mails Google has been trying to suppress – supporting its position. He’s also not perceived to have the clout to settle.
I've been working on setting up a new environment for SAP IDM 7.1 SP5 (yes I know 6 is available). This installation is notable for me since I am configuring it around. So it's my first pure 64 Bit system. I'm pretty excited. So I got the OS installed no problem. Got SQL installed. (gotta say, 2008R2 is probably the smoothest SQL install I've done since SQL Server 7. Very much a fan) Got the IDM DesignTime and Runtime installs completed with no problems. Installed JAVA 1.6 and Installed the 3.0 SQL Server drivers. Then the skies began to darken...
Have you ever run into one of the many limitations of Type 4 JDBC drivers? Ever wished there was an EASY way around them? If you haven’t already, now is the time to check out Progress DataDirect’s Type 5 JDBC Drivers. In this short video you will learn how to install and test the benefits of the Type 5 JDBC driver in your own environment. After viewing this video, you can start enjoying all that Type 5 has to offer in 15 minutes or less. Guaranteed!
MediaPlatform, the enterprise video software company, today announced that its WebCaster software is the first to deliver live webcasts on the Apple iPad® using HTTP live streaming (HLS). WebCaster enables iPad users to view and interact with live presentations that integrate video streaming from Abode® Flash® Media Enterprise Server 4.5 and PowerPoint® slides. Enterprises adopting this technology benefit from giving their information workers greater mobility and remote participation in events, while leveraging the powerful network efficiencies and universal nature of Flash.
If you have have done native mobile app development on Android or iPhone (iOS) then you probably know that testing native apps is not that simple. On the other hand, testing traditional Web applications is pretty straightforward: Launch a Web browser, and you see exactly how the application works and how it looks. Read on and I will show how to test a native app in a similarly straightforward fashion after considering various alternatives. Option 1: Installing the app on the mobile device This option is great in that you can test the app on the actual device. However, getting the app on the device can be very time consuming. And, for each testing iteration, the app would have to be built, sent (or copied) to the phone, installed, and launched on the device. While you get to test on the actual device, the process is very slow. Just imagine if you need to make just a small change in the app.