Industry News

DDN Plans to Roll Out Massive Digital Signage Network with 7-11

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:15:00 EST

This is a deal that has been around for all of this year, and I know the NYC-based guy charged with pulling the technical pieces together. He has been looking at software platforms for months and separating contenders from pretenders based on the criteria he's established. To my knowledge no decision has been made on technology, but if you are not yet aware of it, it is probably pretty pretty darn late to try to get in on it.

3Leaf Makes x86 Boxes into SMP Cloudware

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:30:00 EST

3Leaf Systems, the well-funded start-up, dropped its fig leaf Tuesday and took a running jump into the pools of memory, I/O and cache that it can construct and deconstruct at will based on the application, creating scale-up shared-memory SMP systems the likes of mainframes, proprietary mid-range machines and pricey RISC-based Unix boxes out of racks of cheap and dirty two-socket scale-out x64 systems.

Funambol Acquires Zapatec

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:01:00 EST

Funambol, a provider of open source mobile cloud sync and push email for billions of phones, today announced it has acquired Zapatec, Inc., a leader of AJAX web 2.0 frameworks. The acquisition enables Funambol to uniquely address the industry pervasive device fragmentation challenge that plagues developers and requires building native apps for too many platforms. The combination of Funambol's open source mobile sync and push server, with Zapatec's AJAX web 2.0 technology, will foster a new generation of open, rich mobile browser native apps for billions of smart- and feature phones. This provides the best of both worlds -- rich mobile web native apps that 'sync and push' and that work on all devices.

SOASTA Adds Support for Open Source Testing from the Cloud at Cloud Expo

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:30:00 EST

SOASTA, a provider cloud testing, today announced that performance engineers can now build web application tests in Apache JMeter, the most popular open source load testing tool, and run them in SOASTA's Global Test Cloud. Deploying JMeter tests to the Cloud has been a complex, time-consuming and manual process. SOASTA now makes it dramatically easier for the JMeter community to create, deploy, execute and analyze load and performance tests in the Cloud.

Yahoo! Announces Open Source Distribution of Traffic Server at Cloud Expo

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:30:00 EST

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, took its second major step in five months towards open-source cloud computing today, debuting an open source version of Traffic Server, a high performance application server for builders of cloud services. Traffic Server enables the session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for an entire cloud computing stack. It follows the Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop as another example of Yahoo!’s unprecedented commitment to open source cloud computing initiatives. Yahoo! has donated the Traffic Server code to The Apache Software Foundation through the Apache Incubator, and intends to build a robust community of developers around the open source Traffic Server. Shelton Shugar, senior vice president of Cloud Computing at Yahoo!, will be discussing the new technology tomorrow at the Cloud Computing Expo.

Yahoo! Announces Open-Source Cloud Server

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:30:00 EST

“We see Traffic Server as an essential building block for cloud computing, and at Yahoo!, it’s integral to our edge services, on-line storage and cloud serving. The open-sourcing of Traffic Server is representative of our company-wide commitment to sharing technology innovation with the open source community, as well as our broader intention to continue to open source our cloud technologies as they mature,” said Shugar. “By releasing an open source version of Traffic Server, we are sharing a core piece of technology with the open-source world, while also signaling our intention to build a community of developers to take it to the next level.”

Ruiz Out in Insider Trading Scandal

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

Former AMD CEO Hector Ruiz, the guy who spun out AMD’s plants into a joint venture with the government of Abu Dhabi and then became chairman of that company when it was formed in March, has stepped down after being identified as one of the tipsters leaking material inside information to hedge funds that traded on it.

4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo Starts Today

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:10:00 EST

A round-up of the wide range of important issues and timely topics due to be discussed by over 130 industry experts at SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, opening today at the Santa Clara Convention Center, November 2-4, 2009. From Building Scalable and Extensible RIAs in the Cloud to Yahoo! Cloud @ Internet Scale.

Canonical Offers Free Cloudware

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:45:00 EDT

Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition, code named Karmic Koala, became generally available for free download Thursday. That’s the stuff that introduces Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), a k a Eucalyptus Software’s open source software, as a fully supported technology. The widgetry is based on the same APIs as Amazon EC2 and, as previously reported, lets businesses build private clouds.

‘The Crash is Behind Us’: Peddie

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:00:00 EDT

Third-quarter shipments of graphics processors were up 21.2% sequentially and Q2 was a strong quarter so graphics maven Jon Peddie feels safe in predicting a Merry Christmas for PCs and the industry. AMD showed the biggest jump in quarter-to-quarter growth at 30% followed by Intel at 21%. Intel shipped the most parts at 63 million, over twice as many as its nearest competitor Nvidia. "A total of 119.45 million units were shipped in the third quarter, exceeding the record 111 million units that shipped in Q3 2008," Peddie said. "The crash of fall 2008 is now behind us."

Oracle+MySQL Opponents Take to the Barricades

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:45:00 EDT

Monty Widenius, the creator of the MySQL open source database – which is apparently all that stands between Oracle and its acquisition of Sun – thinks that Oracle shouldn’t have his baby and that the European Commission – whose investigation into MySQL has put the Oracle-Sun merger in limbo – should force Oracle to spit it out to another company.

Zend Server Gets a Plane-like ‘Black Box’

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:45:00 EDT

Zend Technologies, the PHP company, has hung Zend Server 5.0, which support IBM i as well as Linux and Windows, out for public beta. A production release should be out by the end of the year. The widgetry is a major new version of the company’s enterprise-ready PHP application server, including Code Tracing, which is supposed to slash problem resolution time by up to 50%.

Convio Expands Open Platform

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EDT

Convio today announced expansion of its Open Platform which is helping nonprofit organizations tap the power of technology and the Internet to better reach, engage and move people to support their cause. The company is introducing Convio Web Services, a new set of standard interfaces for building client applications that retrieve and synchronize data with Convio. The company has also delivered several new APIs and launched a new developer version of its Open website which offers improved documentation as well as access to more than 60 APIs (application programming interfaces) at www.open.convio.com.

10th Circuit Hands SCO a Jury Trial

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:15:00 EDT

It’s been six years, tens of millions of dollars and untold legal delays since SCO first sued IBM for poaching Unix code and putting it in Linux, and without the starch in its collar that its ousted CEO Darl McBride evidently supplied it sounds like it’s folding like a basket of limp washing.

SpringSource Moving to Spring 3.0

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:30:00 EDT

VMware’s recent SpringSource acquisition, the Java widgetry folk, is moving to Spring 3.0, a major release of its vaunted Java development framework for building web and service-based applications. It announced a feature-complete release candidate Monday and expects to go to GA soon.

Citizen Developers Will Build New Business Apps

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:33:00 EDT

By 2014, citizen developers will build at least 25 percent of new business applications, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner said that this advance should both enable end users and free up IT resources. However, analysts warned that IT organizations that fail to capitalize on the opportunities that citizen development presents will find themselves unable to respond to rapidly changing market forces and customer preferences. Gartner defines a citizen developer as a user operating outside of the scope of enterprise IT and its governance who creates new business applications for consumption by others either from scratch or by composition.

VMware Coming Back Along with the Economy

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 06:45:00 EDT

VMware, the acknowledged leader in virtualization, came in with third-quarter revenues of $490 million, up 4% year-over-year, beating estimates of around $474 million. The recession has really crimped VMware’s style. This time last year its revenues were up 32% year-over-year to $472 million and that wasn’t even its personal best. However, showing

Open-Xchange and SugarCRM Partner to Combine Open Source Collaboration

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:15:00 EDT

Open-Xchange, a provider of open source groupware, and SugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, today announced a cooperation to integrate data from SugarCRM and Open-Xchange collaboration software. The integration enables users to gather and aggregate data from their social network profiles (such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Xing), as well as their SugarCRM application, to store it in an Open-Xchange address book as well as share it with others. This information can then be moved to the SugarCRM application. In addition, the SugarCRM data imported into Open-Xchange can be accessed from smartphones, or published to the Internet.

Fired SCO CEO Fires Back

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:15:00 EDT

The real trustee, McBride says, is a Blank Rome lawyer called Bonnie Fatell who couldn't be bothered calling Cerberus - you know, Cerberus, as in Chrysler Financial and General Motors Financial (GMAC) - which was willing to put $25 million into SCO and get it out of hock because Cerberus has backed McBride before. It gave McBride $50 million back in 1997 to roll up a bunch if Internet companies like, oh, Razorfish (nee Avenue A | Razorfish), MarchFirst (nee US Web) and Scient and that was then sold to, oh, aQuantive, which was then sold to, oh, Microsoft for, oh, $6 billion, Redmond's biggest acquisition to date.

LynuxWorks Releases Latest LynxOS-178 Support for AppliedMicro Boards

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:00:00 EDT

LynuxWorks(TM), Inc., a world leader in embedded software, today announced the availability of its board support package (BSP) for two additional motherboards from Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC), a global leader in embedded processing solutions.

MontaVista Announces Support for Next-Generation LTE

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:24:00 EDT

MontaVista Software has announced the next release of their Carrier Grade Edition (CGE) Linux with over 30 different Linux Support Packages (LSP’s) available immediately. CGE 5.1 adds support for next generation 4G wireless networks including LTE and WiMAX, and includes full integration of the OpenSAF high availability middleware consistent with Service Availability Forum specifications. In addition, MontaVista becomes the first commercial Linux vendor to offer virtual routing and forwarding (VRF) capabilities for secure wireless networks. CGE 5.1 remains the only carrier grade Linux to be compliant with Carrier Grade Linux, IPv6, and Linux Standard Base certifications.

AMD Fools the Pundits, While Google & IBM Pull Their Weight

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:45:00 EDT

AMD was supposed to lose 42 cents in the third quarter on sales of $1.26 billion according to the smart money on Wall Street. Instead it up and came in Thursday with losses of only 18 cents a share on $1.396 billion in revenue. Now as nice as that is for AMD, it’s even more important in what it says about the economic recovery, especially when paired with Intel’s consumer-driven homerun results the other day.

What If Darl McBride Gets Fired?

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EDT

Darl McBride, the CEO of SCO and the industry’s favorite pariah, expects to get fired any minute now. He expects to get fired because he’s adamantly opposed to winding SCO down, laying off its people and settling the company’s litigation against Novell and IBM for chump change, which is the way he sees things going if the Chapter 11 trustee put in charge of SCO keeps going down the path he appears to be going down – despite the fact that the trustee told McBride when he got there that he thinks there is “significant value in the litigation.”

Avaya Uses Xen for Unified Communications

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EDT

Avaya, the telecommunications outfit spun out of Lucent in 2000 and taken private by Silver Lake Partners and TPG Capital for $8.2 billion in 2007, the company that’s buying Nortel’s Enterprise Division for $900 million, a move that will recombine Northern Electric and Western Electric, entities that haven’t been together since 1949, means to announce a virtualized unified communications solution today targeted at SMBs.

Android Makes Inroads

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:30:00 EDT

AT&T is reportedly going to offer a Dell Android-based smartphone to U.S customers of its cellphone network next year, according to an unconfirmed piece in the Wall Street Journal. Reuters says the thing will be a version of the Marvell Technology-designed oPhone “prototype” Dell showed off in China some weeks back.

MuleSoft Kicks into the Cloud

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:00:00 EDT

MuleSoft, the web middleware concern, has released Tcat Server 6 R1, an enterprise-class web application server based on Apache Tomcat that now includes cloud deployment capabilities enabled in one click by a plug-in for Amazon EC2. Administrators can manage their server instances both in the cloud as well as behind the firewall from the Tcat Server console.

DataSync and SugarCRM Form Strategic Partnership

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:45:00 EDT

DataSync, a provider of integrated small business software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, and SugarCRM, the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, have announced a strategic partnership to deliver an integrated suite of small business applications to small businesses.

Citrix Claims It’s Got Desktop Virtualization Nailed

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:00:00 EDT

Citrix started opening the kimono on XenDesktop 4 Monday claiming it’s the complete answer to desktop virtualization and will revolutionize desktop computing for hundreds of millions of corporate users. Judging from the pilots going into production and 40,000- to 125,000-seat deployments it’s seen this year, Citrix figures that desktop virtualization’s time to go mainstream is now but it says that first-generation VDI-only solutions – its own and others – can’t replace most of the classic, old-fashioned desktops out there because they’re built out of piece parts of server virtualization and work for only a niche-y few.

Likewise Authentication Software Supports Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:00:00 EDT

Likewise announced today availability of both Likewise Open 5.3 and Likewise Enterprise 5.3 software that supports Apple's new Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, enabling those systems to be integrated with Microsoft Active Directory. Likewise Open allows computers running Mac OS X Snow Leopard to authenticate with an organization's existing Active Directory. Likewise Enterprise builds on the authentication engine of Likewise Open, making it easy for IT managers to authenticate users, control access to applications and data, centrally manage settings with group policies and create reports for regulatory audits. In addition, Likewise Enterprise is the only solution to provide 100 percent native support for Apple's Workgroup Manager application.

Trustee Backs SCO’s Litigation Against Novell

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:00:00 EDT

In the unlikely event that Novell and IBM harbored any hope that the trustee set over SCO would abandon its litigation, that hope has been dashed. SCO last Thursday sent in its brief opposing Novell’s bid for a rare en banc rehearing of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision overturning a Utah summary judgment that Novell owns Unix “by and through Edward W. Cahn as Chapter 11 Trustee.”

AMD Names Ex-PeopleSoft CEO to Its Board

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:30:00 EDT

Craig Conway, the guy who got bounced out of PeopleSoft in the middle of its prolonged and eventually hopeless fight to stop Oracle from taking it over, has been named to AMD’s board. Conway has a talent for rebuilding companies but as president and CEO of PeopleSoft, the PeopleSoft board decided the former Ellison lieutenant’s rosy statements about the impact Oracle’s hostile takeover bid was wreaking on the company misled investors and without sugarcoating its “loss of confidence” ignominiously tossed him out on his ear.

Microsoft Browser Solution Under Fire

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:00:00 EDT

The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), the group of Microsoft foes that has been hounding the company for years with complaints to the European Commission, and Opera, one of its members, are griping that the proposed ballot screen solution to the EC’s charge that Microsoft’s bundling of its IE browser in Windows violates antitrust law, a claim based on a complaint that Opera initiated, is too complicated for the poor dumb user to master.

Cloudera Announces Beta Release of Cloudera Desktop

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 06:01:00 EDT

Cloudera, the commercial Hadoop company, has announced the release of Cloudera Desktop, a unified graphical user interface for Hadoop applications. The initial release of Cloudera Desktop includes tools for job and cluster management. Cloudera Desktop makes Hadoop easier to use and manage. Business analysts, developers and administrators can use the Cloudera Desktop user interface to create and submit jobs, to monitor cluster health and to browse the data stored on a Hadoop cluster. Experienced users can choose between the command-line tools provided by the open source project or the Cloudera Desktop GUI.

What’s Larry Gonna Do About This?

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EDT

Kickfire, the data warehouse start-up with its very own parallel-processing SQL chip – and the first low-end data warehouse play ever – has beefed up its MySQL Enterprise-based appliance so it’ll stretch to systems that are 5TB. Back in the spring when it started rolling its widgets out they were good for up to 3TB and started at $32,000, claiming to be the equivalent of a $250,000 proprietary system. The start-up has also beefed up its software with a 1.5 so-called “Photon” release that ups performance by running 95% of the queries through its SQL chip and makes its Data Manipulation Language (DML) 300% faster.

Burton Migrates from UNIX to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 08:30:00 EDT

Novell has announced The Burton Corporation moved its mission-critical applications from UNIX* to SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server from Novell to improve system uptime and reduce overall server-related costs by 80 percent. Burton migrated to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in 2008. Burton's previous operating platform had experienced frequent downtime, putting a strain on all aspects of the business. After determining a UNIX upgrade would be cost-prohibitive, the company chose SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a stable, reliable platform for its SAP- and Oracle-based IT environments.

Deputy CIO of the CIA to Keynote 1st Annual GovIT Expo

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announces that Jill Tummler Singer, Deputy Chief Information Officer at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), will be delivering the opening keynote at the 1st Annual Government Conference & Expo (www.GovITExpo.com) on October 6th in Washington DC. Ms Singer was appointed in November 2006 and is responsible for ensuring CIA has the information, technology, and infrastructure necessary to effectively execute its missions. Prior to her appointment as Deputy CIO, Ms. Singer served as the Director of the Diplomatic Telecommunications Service (DTS), United States Department of State, and was responsible for global network services to US foreign missions.

SCO Told to Rebut Novell’s Appeal-of-a-Appeal

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:45:00 EDT

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, which overturned the Utah district court’s summary judgment that Novell owns Unix, has given SCO until October 1 to file a retort to Novell’s motion for an en banc rehearing of the case. Apparently that’s standard operating procedure. The odds are still against Novell getting a rare rehearing but it does drag out how long it will be before SCO can get a trial date back in Utah, which appears to be Novell’s object in the move.

Red Hat Navigates the Summer Doldrums Well

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:30:00 EDT

Red Hat did slightly better than the Wall Street pundits supposed it would in its last quarter, the dreaded summer months of June through August in the midst of an awful year. Boosted by a tax benefit, earnings were up 29% to $27.5 million, or 15 cents a share or 16 cents (non-GAAP), on revenue up 12% year-over-year to $183.6 million against expectations of 15 cents on $179.1 million.

The Obese Penguin, How Like Windows

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:45:00 EDT

Linux creator Linus Torvalds said at LinuxCon this week that Linux is “getting bloated” and that “it’s a problem.” “I’d love to say we have a plan,” he lamented. “I mean, sometimes it’s a bit sad and we’re definitely not the streamlined hyper-efficient kernel that I had envisioned 15 years ago….The kernel is huge and bloated, and our icache footprint is scary. I mean there’s no question about that.”

Open Source Start-up Poses Mainframe Dilemma for IBM

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:30:00 EDT

IBM’s paranoid defense of its mainframe monopoly is going to be tested again but this time if it blows the start-up out of the water, or denies it clearance to compete, it’ll be messing with an open source operation, and a European open source start-up to boot. The European Commission, an admitted open source advocate, is already entertaining at least one known complaint about IBM’s allegedly anti-competitive behavior in the mainframe market.