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This will be worth watching as it evolves. Can GPL 3.0 ever become as attractive to commercial software companies as the Apache 2.0 license?
Link: GPL 3.0 Draft Tackles Patents, Compatibility
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—The first discussion draft of the GNU General Public License was finally released on Monday, and addresses the issues of patents and patent-related retaliation, as well as its compatibility with other licenses.
GPL v3 Draft can be found here.
In a press release this week, DataSynapse and Informatica announced a partnership agreement whereby DS's GridServer technology will support the Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform.
DataSynapse has to expand its market beyond their successful foray into the financial services sector. Business intelligence, drafting behind partners like Informatica, seems a sensible approach to me.
The agreement will enhance the deployment of PowerCenter in service-oriented IT environments where heterogeneous system resources are pooled and allocated as needed to satisfy computing demand. Informatica's PowerCenter empowers customers to cost-effectively scale their data integration processing across such pooled resources. An interface with GridServer provides added flexibility to coordinate PowerCenter workloads with other applications on the grid. The result is a more agile, scalable and manageable IT infrastructure that speeds application processing time for improved throughput and productivity.
To explain UDDI in 200 words or less, Phil WIndley has a graphic and the "sidebar text" to go with it.
Phil Windley's Technometria | Understanding UDDI
As part of the SOA governance feature and Infravio X-Registry review that are going to be in InfoWorld in a few weeks, I’m trying to come up with a short (less than 200 words) sidebar and graphic on understanding UDDI.
This week came the announcement that Mercury Interactive is bulking up its Business Technology Optimization (BTO) approach by adding SOA governance to the offer.
Link: Mercury buys Systinet in SOA governance play
... Governance capabilities are critical for Mercury. The company defines governance as the delivery of a predictable, consistent SOA, with control, visibility, and integrity to ensure the reuse of business services. Optimizing quality, performance, and availability of SOA applications also is part of governance, according to Mercury.
Key Systinet products cited include Systinet Registry (Overview, Articles, Company), which is a UDDI-compliant registry for managing and publishing reusable business services and other SOA services, and Systinet Policy Manager, for streamlining policy creation and management and automating service validation. ...
James Governor goes on to ask and then answer the question Why? and notes that in taking this approach, Mercury seems to be pitting itself directly against IBM's Tivoli Relationship Registry based on the Collation acquisition.
It's also fun to see Governor, InfoWorld journalists and Miko Matsumura point out the benefits of this move to Infravio, and the resulting higher profile as a potential acquisition by the likes of BEA, BMC or one of the other majors in this area.
Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's COO, is quoted by InfoWorld as stating that Sun Microsystems will soon begin breaking out the revenues from the company's software business. The question is ... why now?
First, if the software revenues are big enough, are showing profitability (or something close), and are demonstrating year-by-year growth in the double digits, this may provide the street with something more to go on with respect to the company's valuation. That would be just good sense.
Another thought: Besides doing a better job at providing transparency to the company's revenues and where the margins are, could this be a precursor to either (a) creating a separately tracked stock or (b) creating a separate, Sun software (and services ?) company -- distinct from the hardware / systems company?
Link: Sun to break out software revenue
... In an interview at the conference here, Sun President and Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Schwartz told IDG News Service that the company will soon begin reporting the revenue from its software business. Currently, the company reports only systems, storage, and services revenue. He did not provide a time frame for when the change will be made.
The move may provide insight into how much revenue Sun derives from its Java technology licensing business, something the company has never fully disclosed since it introduced the technology in 1996. Sun executives long have been lambasted for not revealing how much money the company actually makes from Java licensing, which Schwartz said is a profitable business at the company.
However, because the company sees Java's true value not in licensing but as a driver for its infrastructure business, Sun has never felt the need to report how much money it derives from Java licensing, he said. ...
An interesting article on the speed at which the various providers of execution virtualization are predicting and acting upon "hypervisors as commodity." The actions they're taking are worth noting: blow by the creation of a big-margin business around hypervisors, and focus on the management of the virtualization infrastructure and/or their application.
Link: Xen Pushes Virtual Software Battle Upstream
As Xen 3.0 and other open-source offerings like OpenVZ threaten to commoditize the core-virtualization stack, all virtualization firms, including VMware and XenSource, are focusing their commercial attentions higher up the stack.
XenSource, for example, is bypassing the core platform market altogether and instead will try to make money on an advanced virtualization management platform called XenOptimizer. The commercial offering, set to be available early this year, provides advanced virtualization capabilities for the Linux data center, the company said. A Windows version is possible but company executives would not elaborate on its long-term plans.
The Xen 3.0 engine will provide the core virtualization capabilities and XenOptimizer will offer advanced services including physical-to-virtual conversions, drag-and-drop provisioning of virtual servers, zero downtime maintenance and centralized monitoring and fine-grained control of CPU, memory, network and storage resources, all through a centralized dashboard. ...
The grid infrastructure world just got more interesting. The article doesn't provide a schedule on which customers can buy hosted services from EMC Corp. But it does say that within 2 years EMC will offer a packaged version of the technology.
The questions that occur to me:
With what products -- EMC's or third party's -- will the new grid infrastructure be certified? Their Information Lifecycle Management product lines?
What's missing from the recipe? Scheduling? Accounting? Policy framework?
Link: EMC buys grid software, offers hosted services
EMC Corp. today announced that it has acquired the intellectual property for grid software developed by Acxiom Corp. for $30 million, and will work with the company to offer grid-based hosted services. Acxiom is a $1.9 billion public company based in Conway, Ark.
Specifically, EMC has acquired the grid middleware that Acxiom uses for internal purposes to run its hosted business analytics service. Acxiom's customers include Citigroup, Bank of America, BMW, Charles Schwab, Sears, Nationwide, Western Union, Sprint, Discovery Communications Inc. and Unilever that buy data mining, data hygiene and other business analytics services from Acxiom on a hosted basis. Acxiom is the only company that has deployed the grid software.
According to Ian Baird, chief technology officer of grid and utility computing at EMC, Axiom's software includes all the elements to build a complete grid, such as security tools, grid portals, directory and scheduling services, databases and other components. "It's a complete stack unlike many point solutions for grid … the Globus toolkit is a collection of different elements," Baird said.
Within two years EMC plans to sell this grid software to customers in a nonhosted scenario. "It will allow a company to provide IT services against its infrastructure on a utility basis," Baird said. The vision is for IT resources to be much more flexible, and to be available and paid for on demand, improving utilization and lowering costs. EMC said the grid software can run other applications besides business analytics, for healthcare, retail and other industries.
...
Link: EMC Unveils Grid Gameplan
An another article which sheds a bit more light on EMC's and Axciom's plans.
... EMC and Axciom have actually constructed a multi-faceted partnership. EMC is paying for Acxiom’s grid software, but the two companies will jointly develop and sell a hosted grid service that Acxiom offers. Eventually, they will integrate systems, software, and services into a non-hosted grid product. EMC will then sell the grid product, while Acxiom continues to sell the hosted services.
"We will jointly market the hosted solution while we are building out the real solution that we wish to deliver -- that’s a product that installs beyond the customer firewall," says Ian Baird, EMC's CTO of grid and utility computing and head of its new grid incubation unit. ...
The grid infrastructure world just got more interesting. The article doesn't provide a schedule on which customers can buy hosted services from EMC Corp. But it does say that within 2 years EMC will offer a packaged version of the technology.
The questions that occur to me:
With what products -- EMC's or third party's -- will the new grid infrastructure be certified? Their Information Lifecycle Management product lines?
What's missing from the recipe? Scheduling? Accounting? Policy framework?
Link: EMC buys grid software, offers hosted services
EMC Corp. today announced that it has acquired the intellectual property for grid software developed by Acxiom Corp. for $30 million, and will work with the company to offer grid-based hosted services. Acxiom is a $1.9 billion public company based in Conway, Ark.
Specifically, EMC has acquired the grid middleware that Acxiom uses for internal purposes to run its hosted business analytics service. Acxiom's customers include Citigroup, Bank of America, BMW, Charles Schwab, Sears, Nationwide, Western Union, Sprint, Discovery Communications Inc. and Unilever that buy data mining, data hygiene and other business analytics services from Acxiom on a hosted basis. Acxiom is the only company that has deployed the grid software.
...
I'm not sure why people are surprised that outages still occur at service providers like Salesforce.com and TypePad. It does make for "good" tech journalism, in that it provides the journalist with a couple of hooks to warn the readership of both the wonders of Software as a Service (S-a-a-S) and its perils.
The point is this: scaling for the highly successful S-a-a-S provider is hard, and continuity is terribly important. What's not clear to the provider in advance of a move or a data center upgrade is the degree to which they need to prepare (and then pay for) business continuity. This is one of the areas Univa hopes to address by deploying Univa Globus Enterprise as part of a "lower cost" / higher performance approach to continuity and failover.
Link: Week of crashes highlights on-demand peril |
InfoWorld | News | 2005-12-21 | By Stacy Cowley, IDG News Service
...
Salesforce.com is being tight-lipped about the roots of Tuesday's outage. A software problem with one of Salesforce.com's database clusters caused the service to be intermittently unreachable for some customers for about six hours, according to Bruce Francis, Salesforce.com's vice present of corporate strategy. Salesforce.com does not yet know the extent of the outage, he said.
...
Salesforce.com's blackout followed similar downtime from other "software as a service" providers. Six Apart Ltd.'s TypePad blog hosting service went down for the day last Friday following a failed storage upgrade. Affected customers included Major League Baseball's MLB.com site, which hosts all of its blogs with TypePad. In addition, the del.icio.us bookmark-sharing service that Yahoo Inc. just bought suffered days of problems last week after its data center lost power. ...
We're stuck in Albuquerque, waiting for a plane to be released by ATC to fly into Midway (Chicago). It's now about two hours late, and we're looking at another 45 minutes at least. Christine has made it clear to me that the two things making this delay tolerable are a free Wi-fi network provided by the Albuquerque Sunport, and an electrical outlet nearby. She's deeply involved with a massive multi-player online game, and it has the appropriate soothing qualities.
I have to admit that, after spending the majority of the past week off-line, this has provided me a bit of time to catch up before diving into the deep water tomorrow morning back at the office.
Thanks, ABQ...
