That is the big news this morning. Mark Hurd, former CEO of HP who resigned abruptly last month, has landed at Oracle as co-president replacing Charles Phillips. Larry Ellison publicly defended him and said in a letter to the NY Times that this was a big mistake by HP’s board to let Mark Hurd go. Clearly, Mark joining Oracle is good news for the future of Oracle. He proved to be a very effective executive at HP over the last five years. Under his watch, HP made the largest acquisition (EDS). Mark is operationally a very effective executive and Oracle will benefit greatly from that experience. I think he may be groomed to become Oracle’s CEO when Larry is ready to leave that role. Given Oracle’s move into hardware and storage (besides its traditional software business), an executive like Mark Hurd would be the most appropriate to provide leadership. He will also continue the aggressive acquisition streak of Oracle. Rumor has it that Oracle is likely going to acquire Netezza and may even go after EMC.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is increasingly considered “enterprise grade” by many IT buyers, and a viable choice to achieve reduced costs, improved service, and ongoing timely functional currency. Customers are looking for "just what I need" solutions – in terms of pricing, functionality, simple on-boarding and minimal infrastructure hassle. Demand for SaaS Delivery is therefore continuing to grow while sales of traditional on-premise solutions are declining. Thus the Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) need to decide whether and when to develop SaaS-based offerings, identify the potential changes to the customer relationships, demand, etc. for a SaaS-based offering, and determine the best architecture and infrastructure options available to provide these offerings. Based on these decisions, the ISVs need to create a roadmap to “SaaS-ify” the existing offerings.
Anybody starting a war with Red Hat better watch out. Its board has named General H. Hugh Shelton (US Army Retired), a two-term former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as its chairman replacing former CEO Matthew Szulik. Shelton’s been on the Red Hat board since 2003 and was previously its lead director. He currently serves on the audit and compensation committees.
HP Tuesday sued its ousted CEO Mark Hurd to block him from going to work for Oracle as co-president, a job just announced Monday night. HP has taken its civil case to California’s Superior Court in Santa Clara alleging misappropriation of trade secrets. It claims Hurd can’t possibly do his new job at Oracle without putting HP in peril and complains that it paid him tens of millions of dollars in severance to sit on the sidelines and keep its secrets for two years. It is suing him under a confidentiality agreement, not a non-compete agreement. Non-competes generally don’t get very far in the California courts. Oracle of course must have anticipated that HP would sue and just decided to brazen it out.
In a breathtakingly unprecedented move never before seen in the Valley, Oracle very late Monday - and on a national holiday in the US - swapped the ex-Morgan Stanley guy who was supposed to be responsible for its blazing trail of acquisitions for ex-HP CEO Mark Hurd, a month to the day since Hurd was ousted by the HP board for reasons that are still incomprehensible to everyone outside of the HP boardroom, an event that has led to speculation that HP was somehow played. Anyway, it's safe to say that the ex-CEO of a major OEM has never skipped to a competitor before - or so quickly - or trailing sexual harassment charges, however bogus. Ain't life grand. According to the official statement out of Oracle Hurd will be an Oracle co-president, reporting to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and a member of the Oracle board. He will be responsible for Oracle's sales, marketing and support.
How can organizations use enterprise/private cloud capabilities to improve information-sharing? In his session at the 7th International Cloud Expo, Ira A. (Gus) Hunt, CTO to the CIO of the Central Intelligence Agency, will discuss how the Intelligence Community has been using enterprise/private cloud capabilities to improve information-sharing across the entire community. Ira A. (Gus) Hunt currently serves as the Chief Technology Officer for the Chief Information Officer in CIA. In this capacity he is responsible for setting the strategic technology direction to enable CIA’s missions, actively engage across the IC to share and communicate IT solutions, and drive solutions for the rapid insertion and adoption of new capabilities to keep pace with technology change in the commercial sector.
HP’s got a private cloud-in-a-box scheme that it trotted out Monday ahead of VMworld called HP CloudStart that’s supposed to provide the cloud-smitten enterprise that’s hanging back everything it needs to get cloud-borne in a mere 30 days complements of HP’s Cloud Consulting Services, so what it’s gonna cost is anybody’s guess. It’s also promising that the platform will push out into a hybrid environment down the road. HP will sell CloudStart, which is for compute services, in Asia-Pacific and Japan to start, expecting to go global in December.
Citrix, which claims to be the most widely deployed cloudware around, in part a factor of running both Amazon and Rackspace, is buying six-year-old VMLogix and its LabManager and StageManager products, old hypervisor-agnostic friends that automate virtualization management in private and public clouds. The widgetry will turn up in Citrix’ OpenCloud infrastructure platform, its tarted-up Xen stack, to help it take on VMware management. Terms were not disclosed. Citrix said it would add lifecycle automation so virtual workloads can migrate between production stages with a single mouse click.
Intel is buying Germany’s Infineon Technologies’ profit-struggling wireless baseband chip business for $1.4 billion cash, roughly three times revenues. It’ll give the semi giant a piece of Apple’s ARM-based iPhone business and a position in other Atom-free wireless widgets. ARM is the smartphone king, but presumably Intel is going to try to push Atom over the hump using Infineon though it needs more than that. Intel, which has banged its head against many a wall trying to figure out phones, means to run the operation as a free-standing operation. It sold similar operations like the ARM-based XScale for cheap back in 2006 to focus on its core business, which is now under market pressure.
Tim Negris contends it's virtually certain that Larry Ellison is going to be asking Mark Hurd to run Sun for him.
Google has pulled out of JavaOne because Oracle is suing Google claiming that Android infringes on its Sun-inherited Java IP. Google blogged that the lawsuit made it “impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally” though that open source gambit may not play. It probably can’t get its bronze sponsorship money back, only cancel its sessions. Meanwhile, Java’s grumpy creator James Gosling, who couldn’t stomach the jump to Oracle, has run up some “Java. Just Free It. Hold Oracles to their Pledge.” T-shirts for the September 19-23 event – or anywhere they might be useful. See http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-javaone.html.
Gartner was late in pooping on the PC party. Intel had already confirmed Wall Street reports that consumer PC sales were crapping out by the time the research house took down its forecast for the second half a half-hearted couple of points, reducing its growth projection to 15.3% against an easy compare. It cited the uncertain economic outlook for the United States and Western Europe as well as sheer supply chain fear. “There is no doubt,” it said, “that consumer, if not business PC demand has slowed relative to expectations in mature markets. Recent dramatic shifts in the PC supply chain were in no small part a reaction to fears of a sharp slowdown in mature-market demand. However, suppliers’ risk-aversion is as much a factor in these shifts as any actual downshift in demand.”
Inter Bounded Task Flows (BTF) communications are aided in JDeveloper 11g by the use of contextual events, a BTF publish-subscribe mechanism for passing data between BTFs. Yet in some situations contextual events may be the equivalent of "using a sledge hammer to crack a nut", where developers try and use them everywhere when there are alternative techniques available that may work just as well. This blog documents a technique for allowing a master ADF application utilising the ADF UI Shell to provide services to a child BTF, including passing data backwards and forwards, without the use of contextual events. While the blog demonstrates a solution within context of the ADF UI Shell, the overall technique should be useful in other ADF solutions.
Back in my younger days, I could run a sub seven-minute mile. When I heard about somebody running a five-minute mile, I thought “now that’s really fast.” Today, the world record for the mile run is 3:43:13, set in 1999 by Hicham El Guerrouj from Morocco. In the ’80s, IT projects felt like they moved at the pace of an eight-minute mile. We took the time to write detailed requirements, detailed design documents, thorough project plans, test plans, you name it. If someone had a new idea or a new process on how to “do it right,” it was implemented. I recall hour-long meetings on ways to improve processes on projects and conversations around what wasn’t being documented that needed to be documented in case somebody asked the question “where’s that documented?” We even took the time to write detailed communication plans, which is something that I haven’t seen in a while. At some point during my career, upper management started asking the question “can you move the project along faster by adding more people?” So we would add a few more developers, cut the QA testing cycle and shaved off a few weeks on the project schedule. It began to feel like a six-minute mile run. Fast-forward to today and it feels like projects are clipping at the pace of a three-minute mile. Fast just wasn’t fast enough! At times, I’ve left work with a splitting headache, a plethora of emails to read when I got home, and pondering if this truly is the current state of IT projects?
What factors make you think a web page is good or not? What keeps on that page longer than others? On the one hand it is the content on the page and whether this content is of interest to you. On the other it is the velocity with which you can navigate through the individual pages. High-Speed internet and performance-optimized pages make our day-to-day browsing easier when accessing our emails, tweets, latest updates on sports or news. With all the changes in the recent years in Web Performance Optimization (WPO) we’ve been spoiled by those sites that follow all these Best Practices and boosted their web site experience. No wonder that we start losing our patience with a site that doesn’t respond as fast as we’ve come to expect.
Google has pulled out all 17 of its presentations from the upcoming JavaOne conference in San Francisco. Yes, it's because of that lawsuit. This is what Reuters has to say about it.
Unless Oracle and Google will settle on their little issues, JavaOne may be dead. Or to say it properly, Java One will fork, bit it'll never be an event that would gather 10-12 thousands of ENTHUSIASTIC Java developers under the same roof. I'm still going there and, on return, will share with you what kind of vibe/energy I've experienced, if any.
I know this guy who should consider this as an opportunity and create large conference, an alternative to JavaOne. He knows how to do it.
In general, this Oracle/Google dispute may turn into a birth of a new language created by Google, which will make java obsolete like COBOL.
Now there are 17 empty slots to be filled with substitute speakers. I'm wondering who's going to be a substitute presenter for the annual Java Puzzlers by Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter?
Fujitsu president Masami Yamamoto said the company is “very actively” seeking software acquisitions, particularly the cloud and middleware kind, to ratchet up its global growth, according to BusinessWeek. It could take another six months or more for Fujitsu to light on anything. It’s also interested in alliances presumably like its recent Azure appliance hardware deal with Microsoft.
A US court has told Chen Lai-juh, the CEO of Taiwan LCD screen maker AU Optronics Corporation, not to leave the country until his trial on Justice Department-brought charges of price-fixing is over. A federal grand jury indicted Chen and a half-dozen other AU officials of years of price fixing back in June. Alleged victims include IBM, Apple and Dell. Six LCD suppliers had pleaded guilty to price fixing and have been ordered to pay upwards of $860 million in fines.
Worldwide server revenues surged 11% to $10.9 billion in Q2, according to IDC, which calls it the second consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth, the fastest quarterly revenue growth since 2003 and the fourth consecutive quarter of improving server market demand. Trouble is that was two months ago and, what with Wall Street saying PC demand has subsequently tanked, one would really like to know whether server sales are still looking better. Based on its Q2 numbers IDC says it “continues to see widespread infrastructure refresh occurring across all geographies. While much of this refresh is occurring first in x86-based servers, IDC expects the recovery to extend to Unix and mainframe platforms in the second half of 2010.”
Security is a prime impediment to cloud adoption, right? Right. Well, Centrify has this idea: Suppose it turns any company’s venture into the cloud into a lock-box – sealed off from the nasties – if anything dastardly happens the user has only its own staff to blame. That way companies won’t be forfeiting their soul simply to take advantage of the cloud’s siren’s song about cheap price points. Next week at VMWorld Centrify is going to offer to isolate virtual machines no matter where they are through the security in Microsoft’s Active Directory – complements of AD’s policy logic – and let them take the job away from the host provider.
Remember that rosy picture that Intel CEO Paul Otellini painted in mid-July about how everything was simply lovely and how “the PC and server segments are healthy and demand for leading-edge technology will continue to increase for the foreseeable future? Well, it’s turning into “The Portrait of Dorian Gray.” Those warning signs that Wall Street was getting about the chip market turning down were on the money. Intel Friday morning lowered its buoyant outlook of a few weeks ago and cut its Q3 projections of sales of $11.2 billion-$12 billion down to $10.8 billion-$11.2 billion. Analysts that were really thinking $11.5 billion will have to adjust even more.
In this white paper read how Skyline Software Systems, Inc. needed a “more comprehensive solution that could work across multiple media formats,” and switched from homegrown to SafeNet Sentinel HASP.
Hard drive is a commodity. Whether it is IDE, EIDE or SATA, you buy the right one and you can plug it directly into your computer. On the service providers front (service providers are the biggest cloud storage service providers), they may not all create cloud storage services themselves. For example, AT&T and Peer1 are using EMC Atmos. Verizon and Planet are using Nirvanix. As time goes on, we will see the same provider using multiple backend solutions to satisfy different need. Also when service providers merge, the merged company may be using backend solutions from multiple vendors. On the cloud storage vendor front, more and more are conforming to the Amazon S3 API. We saw Google Storage for Developers, Eucalyptus, Dunkel and Mezeo all creating S3 compatible APIs for their cloud storage solutions. On the other hand, Rackspace is pushing the OpenStack project. All are trying to create a unified interface.
Data virtualization has become a hot topic as enterprises and government agencies add this maturing technology to their data integration toolkits in pursuit of greater IT agility and lower costs. Rising key performance indicators (KPIs) for both demand and supply clearly tell this story. With demand exploding fivefold[1], and ETL, ESB and BI vendors extending their existing data integration offerings and bringing new data virtualization wares to market, enterprises and government agencies are seeking a way to measure and compare the data virtualization platform offerings available, to determine which is the most appropriate for their information architectures.
SafeNet discusses IDC's findings on the best practices for the deployment of software licensing and entitlement management technologies. Learn how software publishers can benefit from faster time-to-market, increased ability to capture and optimize revenue, and reduced operational inefficiencies.
