Posts Tagged Hosted PBX Solutions

NaggieOracle launches worldwide cloud computing tour

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

With the launching a roughly 50-date global road show on the topic for developers and system administrators, Oracle has officially put both the legs on the cloud-computing bandwagon.

In contrast to CEO Larry Ellison’s well-publicized mocking of cloud computing, the move stands, which he has deemed a rebranding and conflation of existing technologies. But it’s not as if the ongoing tour wasn’t telegraphed.

During a recent webcast on how the company plans to use the assets it gained from the purchase of Sun Microsystems, executives indicated Oracle’s main focus will be on helping customers build private clouds. In 2008, Ellison himself said, albeit with sarcasm, that Oracle would make cloud computing announcements in the future.

Ellison said, “If orange is the new pink we’ll make orange blouses. I’m not going to fight this thing”. “Maybe we’ll do an ad. I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than … change the wording on some of our ads.”

But the road show will apparently go further than that by detailing in depth Oracle’s particular take on cloud computing, a label that has been slapped on everything from virtualized, scalable pools of computing infrastructure, such as that sold by Amazon Web Services, to SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications.

Events’ attendees will be able to “break through the haze” surrounding the topic, as “Oracle experts” clarify how companies can take advantage of “enterprise cloud computing.” The topics will include the tips to develop a private cloud, how to move current IT environments to a cloud-like structure, and how to use public cloud options such as AWS.

According to 451 Group analyst China Martens, the company simply has to stake a public claim in cloud computing given how pervasive the market forces in this direction are. One issue facing Oracle is how to include the Sun technologies in its plans, and that work is probably not complete, she added.

Already the company has made it clear that it has no immediate designs on Amazon’s turf, as it has abandoned Sun’s plans for a public cloud service. According to Martens, Oracle has sometime to formulate its own answer.

She added, whatever [Ellison] says is going to get lots and lots of play, and sometimes he says whatever comes into his head. And Oracle has to pull back and rephrase that. That’s what they’re doing, but slowly and carefully. They can set their own pace but have to show they’re listening to the market and [are] not in a bubble.

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NaggieOracle buys SOA management vendor AmberPoint

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

On Monday, Oracle fattened up its already burgeoning middleware stack, announcing that it has purchased SOA (service oriented architecture) management vendor AmberPoint. Terms were not disclosed.

SOA refers to a systems design approach that eschews monolithic applications and instead designates various processes, such as running a credit check on a customer, as interoperable “services” that allow code to be flexibly reused.

AmberPoint’s software is used to monitor the performance of SOA-driven applications and help users solve problems. According to an FAQ document Oracle released Monday (PDF), it is “highly complementary” to Oracle’s own SOA software and will “enable increased control and performance of critical applications across the enterprise.

It’s not yet clear how the deal will affect road maps for AmberPoint’s products. A review is under way and more details will be forthcoming, according to Oracle. And investment in the products is expected to increase.

According to Tony Baer on the On Strategies Perspective blog, AmberPoint was one of a dwindling group of still-standing independents delivering runtime governance for SOA environments.

He added, the move “patches some gaps in its Enterprise Manager offering, not only in SOA runtime governance, but also with business transaction management — and potentially — better visibility to non-Oracle systems”.

And in the first half of this year, the deal is expected to close.

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SuzanneDell plans new line of ‘private cloud’ servers this year

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Dell is planning to take some of the custom servers designed by its Data Center Solutions division for Web giants like Yahoo and Facebook and sell them to a wider range of companies, including large enterprises, according to Dell executives.

About three years ago, the DCS unit was formed to help Dell get more business from large Internet firms. Its engineers often spend several weeks on-site with those companies to design low-cost, low-power systems that meet the special requirements of their search, social networking and other Web applications.

In an interview, Dell executives said that hands-on role means the DCS group designs servers only for large companies, such as Ask.com and Microsoft’s Azure division, which order tens of thousands of servers per year, but that’s about to change.

Dell will turn some of those custom servers into standardized products and sell them to companies that order lower volumes of systems later this year, including enterprises building “private cloud” environments in their data centers, and a second tier of smaller Internet companies. They will likely be sold under a new brand, CloudEdge.

Andy Rhodes, a director with Dell’s DCS group, said “What we’ve found is, there are a whole bunch of other customers who want access to those designs but who are not buying in those types of quantities”. “So the big thing we’re solving now, and we’ll talk more publicly about over the next couple of months, is how to provide more of that capability to many, many more customers.”

Dell isn’t discussing specific products yet and is still working out details, such as whether the servers will be sold by DCS or through Dell’s standard server channels. But the goal is to offer the designs to a wider market, even while DCS continues to do custom work for very large customers..

DCS aims to build highly energy-efficient servers that pack a lot of computing power into a small space. The systems often forego redundant power supplies and fans, for example, which saves on component costs and energy bills.

That also makes the servers less resilient to failure — a trade-off large Internet companies are willing to make for lower operational costs. Companies like Google and Yahoo design their Web applications to run on such “fail in place” architectures, so that workloads are rerouted around failed servers with little or no disruption to services.

According to Barton George, cloud evangelist for Dell, the main thing with these hyperscale systems is that the availability and resiliency are baked into the customers’ applications rather than into the hardware.

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NaggieFacebook gets more Bing — and control of display ads

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

Facebook gets more Bing and control of display ads

On Friday, Microsoft said Bing will power Internet searches for Facebook’s 400 million members in an arrangement that returns control of display advertising to the social-networking service.

Previously, Bing had powered online searches on US Facebook pages.

According to Bing general manager Jon Tinter, Microsoft will provide Facebook users full access to Bing features as part of an “expanded cooperation in search”. You will start to see the fruits of our expanded relationship show up in the Facebook experience over the weeks and months ahead, he said.

According to Tinter, the companies mutually agreed that Facebook will take over selling display advertising posted at the website because it “just made more sense” given the unique nature of the website.

The control over the displaying advertisement by Microsoft served up at Facebook stretched back to shortly before the US software giant bought a 1.6-percent stake in Facebook in 2007 for 240 million dollars.

The arrangement was inked in a contract, which was up for renewal.

Last year, Microsoft launched its new Bing search engine.

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NaggieSymbian 3 Goes Open Source, But Nokia Ties Remain

Friday, February 5th, 2010

Now, the Symbian mobile operating system is completely open source. On Thursday, the Symbian Foundation released Symbian 3, the latest version of the platform.

The mobile world continues forging an open strategy with the open-sourcing of Symbian along with the Google’s Android operating system that invites handset makers to further customize and differentiate their products.

According to Haydn Shaughnessy, CEO of Cogenuity and editor of the Symbian Foundation’s blog, the open-sourcing a market-leading product in a dynamic, growing business sector is unprecedented. “Over 330 million Symbian devices have been shipped worldwide, and it is likely that a further 100 million will ship in 2010, with more than 200 million expected to ship annually from 2011 onwards.”

Is the Future Open Source?

Symbian’s transition from proprietary platform to open source is the largest in software history. The Symbian Foundation insists the open-sourcing of the platform lays the foundation for unlimited innovations in mobile development.

According to Lee Williams, executive director of the foundation, the development community is now empowered to shape the future of the mobile industry, and rapid innovation on a global scale will be the result. “When the Symbian Foundation was created, we set the target of completing the open-source release of the platform by mid-2010, and it’s because of the extraordinary commitment and dedication from our staff and our member companies that we’ve reached it well ahead of schedule.”

Any individual or organization can use and modify the code for any purpose under the terms of the Eclipse Public License, whether that be for a mobile device or something else entirely. Symbian’s commitment to openness also includes complete transparency in future plans, including the publication of the platform road map and planned features up to and including 2011. Anyone can now influence the road map and contribute new features.

According to IDC analyst John Delaney, it’s increasingly important for smartphone platforms to offer developers something unique. “The placing into open source of the world’s most widely used smartphone platform emphatically fits that bill. It will be exciting to see where this takes the industry.”

Mobile OS Competition

Despite rolling out ahead of schedule, questions around Symbian’s success in the open-source realm remain. Symbian is still inextricably linked with Nokia, despite the fact that the handset maker set it free and established a foundation around it.

Open-sourcing Symbian is a positive development in light of competition with Android, Gartenberg said, but the resources required to optimize and customize Symbian may deter some handset makers from straying away from Android and Windows Mobile.

“The basic problem that Nokia has with its bulk of ownership of Symbian is the quintessential issue. How do you license something to someone else when you are competing with them?” Gartenberg asked. “Will other handset vendors view even an open-source Symbian as still being primarily a Nokia product and part of the Nokia ecosystem? If so, they may not want to contribute.”

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NaggieJooJoo Tablet PC Promised by End of February

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

joojoo press pic 6 JooJoo Tablet PC Promised by End of February

By the end of February, Fusion Garage’s JooJoo tablet PC is expected to be in consumer hands when it will likely give some indication as to the public’s interest in tablets such as the Apple iPad.

Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan says that not only have the preorders for the JooJoo tablet exceeded expectations, but there has been an increase in inquiries since the debut of the iPad–so it looks like the public may be ready for tablet computers after all, according to Venture Beat.

The JooJoo tablet, which began its life as the TechCrunch Crunch Pad, was announced in December 2009. The 2.4-pound touch screen tablet has a 12-inch, 1366-by-768-pixel display, 1GB of memory, and a 4GB Solid State Drive (used to store the OS and cache data). It also features a USB 2.0 port, Bluetooth support, built-in speakers, Wi-Fi, and a Webcam with a mic. The JooJoo tablet also features a fun (and potentially incredibly annoying) color-tinted screen–but don’t worry, the color can be changed.

The JooJoo tablet uses the web as its primary platform instead of custom-built apps. It also supports Flash and reportedly plays 1080p YouTube streaming videos fairly well. The JooJoo tablet’s price point is close to that of the iPad’s, at $499.

While the JooJoo tablet does beat the iPad in a few ways, it also falls short in some pretty major areas. It has a 4GB SSD, but users cannot directly save files to said drive–it’s purely an internet tablet. The problem with this, of course, is that the JooJoo has Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi only–there is no 3G option, though Fusion Garage is “not ruling out the possibility of 3G in the near future.” Here’s a tip, guys–the “near future” had better come pretty soon or people are going to start wondering what the point is of a big Internet-only-device that you can’t store music on.

Because the JooJoo tablet uses the Internet as its platform, the lack of an “App Store” is another downside. Sure, you don’t really need a Facebook app when you can just go to Facebook itself, but the Apple App Store is definitely a benefit of having an Apple product. Though some are critical of Apple’s extreme vigilance when it comes to apps, recent influxes of malware into other, similar app stores suggest that perhaps Apple is merely being alert. Not only will JooJoo’s lack of an app store make it harder for users to use the platform, but the openness may leave the JooJoo vulnerable to outside attacks.

Simply, the JooJoo tablet is just an internet in your hands, but if Rathakrishnan’s report of increased interest in the JooJoo after the announcement of the iPad is true, perhaps there is a big market for tablet PCs, regardless of what they do (or don’t).

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