Egenera CEO makes dash for Tech Data
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Bye, bye blades Egenera - the blade server company created by Wall Street for Wall Street - has tapped a new CEO after chief Bob Dutkowsky ran off to run Tech Data.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - The annual DEMO conferences are always a useful instrument by which to gauge the health and stature of technology innovation; this year was no different, with 16 companies presenting in the first morning session and a recurring theme that might be dubbed âPower to the People!â said Chris Shipley, executive producer of DEMO. âWe are breaking away from putting technology at the center, and we are putting people at the center who have the authority to influence technology,â Shipley said. Of course, people have always been part of the fun at DEMO, where IT industry haves and have nots share a stage to sing for their supper in front of an audience of peers, venture capitalists, and the press. Shipwire was the poster child for people-powered tech. The new company will help small companies compete with the largest retailers by offering a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution for warehouse management, and the pick-pack-and-ship process. On the enterprise front, 6th Sense Analytics unveiled a kind of âoutsourcing nannyâ software that can help project managers maintain visibility into the progress of any project, capturing all development activities and delivering them back to a hosted server. For example, a project manager in the United States can know when an offshore developer has instantiated the debugger or when he or she is editing the file. The system monitors files by checking byte count, measuring the amount of time spent actively developing software, and looking at how much uninterrupted time is spent doing a particular component of the project, according to Greg Burnell, co-founder and CEO. Although DEMO is often thought of as a platform for startups, established firms were at the show in force, as well. Adobe showed off Apollo, a new platform for those who worry that too much of Web 2.0 is not a good thing. Apollo offers nervous users the reassurance of desktop storage and desktop performance, Adobe officials say, overcoming âthe constraints of a browser.â At the same time Apollo will give developers the ability to work with the Web 2.0 tools they are familiar with to develop desktop applications. Another old-line high-tech company, Wyse Technology, was on hand with a new concept in thin-client architecture dubbed âN10â that uses intelligent software to legislate where software is processed.
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More virtualization, less cloven hooves Egenera has confirmed that it plans to create a separate software business by reselling its server management code.â¦
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SEPTEMBER 03, 2004  - Storage vendor EMC Corp. today named Jeffrey Nick as its chief technology officer. Nick is an IBM veteran who helped design the company&#39;s on-demand computing initiative and led its grid computing strategy.
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GenTek Inc. (NASDAQ: GETI) today announced two changes in its Senior Leadership Team.    Andrew P.
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Microsoft founder and Chairman Bill Gates has been giving keynote speeches at Las Vegas conventions, including the Consumer Electronics Show and the now-defunct Comdex, for decades. Before his last&#160;CES keynote speech&#160;as a full-time company employee, he talked with IDG News Service Executive News Editor Marc Ferranti about his legacy as an innovator, the background behind some of the deals announced at CES this week, and directions for Microsoft.The following is an edited version of the interview:IDGNS: We&#39;ve been tracking your career for some 30 years. One bone of contention has been when people have said that Bill Gates is a business mastermind, but not really an innovator. Can you point out a couple of innovative things you&#39;re particularly proud of?Gates: In terms of what we&#39;re proud of, I think it&#39;s the personal computer that we&#39;re proud of. It was a crazy idea at the time, that we could take the microprocessor and create a software industry around it. There was no software industry. Computing was about big businesses, and what we did in 1975, with me dropping out of school, was to say that we could build an industry that was about empowering people. We could seek out partners to build the hardware. We&#39;d let anyone write software for the work we did, and everything we&#39;ve done, over these 30 years, has been about that vision of personal computing. We were first ones with that vision.And now we&#39;re tackling the new frontiers. We&#39;re bringing TV, we&#39;re bringing new educational experiences, health experiences, onto this device that empowers people in a new rich way. And so it&#39;s pretty broad, the PC industry and our innovations in it -- I don&#39;t think there&#39;s anything in the last 30 years that has had as much impact.IDGNS: In the consumer space, since we&#39;re at CES, can you point out some recent innovations Microsoft can leverage in the next couple of years.Gates: Well the dollars spent on games and Xbox in the U.S. is greater than Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii combined. Really, that&#39;s because of the innovation in Xbox Live -- connecting people up, letting players find each other, matching them, getting video online. It&#39;s a real breakthrough way of thinking about even the future of TV.We&#39;ve got a million people using our Mediaroom, which is TV delivered over the Internet. Companies like AT&amp;T and 19 other phone companies around the world bet their future on this being the new video platform. And what that means is when you think about news, and you go and use Mediaroom news, you see the things that you care about, the ads are targeted at you.Look at what we&#39;ve done with Surface, directly touching and manipulating things -- that&#39;s gonna be a centerpiece.I can go on and on, there&#39;s so much that has to do with making it natural, bringing these things together and integrating them. We&#39;re the company that&#39;s doing the walk -- a lot of business focus but enough consumer focus that, from the biggest game phenomenon in the world to the biggest instant messaging thing, we have a lot of success that represents the innovation we&#39;re put into it.IDGNS: With increasing competition from abroad, innovation is of increasing importance to American companies. What&#39;s your thinking around the link between innovation and intellectual property?Gates: Well, we&#39;re a company that&#39;s based in the United States, but obviously we&#39;re drawing on engineering talent from all over the world. We&#39;ve got an unbelievable research group in China, we&#39;ve got an unbelievable research group in India, and we&#39;re delivering to consumers all over the world as well. And we file for intellectual property in all of these countries. They&#39;re all in different stages in terms of copyright, or patents, and it tends to be a pretty complicated area.Other countries look at what&#39;s going on in the United States and they say they&#39;d like their engineers to have those same opportunities, those same incentive systems, and so there really is a sense of progress in that. It&#39;s just one of the elements that make sure people are willing to take risks and keep the innovation in this industry the fastest of any industry in the world.IDGNS: You&#39;re going to be talking here about new partnerships for Microsoft&#39;s MSN, Xbox Live and Mediaroom IPTV services that will provide more content to drive Microsoft&#39;s consumer entertainment strategy. Can you talk about what you needed to do -- on the technology side and on the business side -- to make these deals happen?Gates: XBox Live is attracting virtually all the content people because of the volume we&#39;ve got there, and they see this group of very engaged users spending a lot of hours and finding new media in that environment, so that&#39;s made it easy for us. Our announcement with NBC on the Olympics is about our innovations in Silverlight, where you can view interactive content, multiple video streams, so it&#39;s really a perfect match for the Olympics where you have all this different content and yet different people care about different parts of it.IDGNS: As your consumer entertainment strategy comes to fruition, how will your business model change from what it has been in the past? Can you quantify goals for advertising-generated revenue?Gates: We&#39;ve seen good growth in our advertising revenue. That&#39;s an area where Google&#39;s the leader and we need to be very innovative to drive the scale. A huge partnership with Viacom is helping us with that. We&#39;ll be signing up more partners around the world. Taking the advertising platform to scale is very valuable for things like the search property we offer.We participate in a lot of business models. We have consumer software like games that you buy on a one-time basis. We have things that you can pay as a monthly fee, that we run up in our servers, as more of a service type model. We have some software we give away for free. And so, ads are coming in as a big, strong component but I don&#39;t see it replacing the others. We need all modalities to be strong.IDGNS: In your philanthropic work, you&#39;ve focused on fundamental health issues for the developing world. In the tech sector, there have been efforts such as the OLPC, and Microsoft&#39;s efforts to reduce prices in developing countries. But there&#39;s been criticism about these efforts. People have been saying, well, a $200 laptop isn&#39;t going to do a kid much good if he doesn&#39;t live to age five. With this in mind what do you think technology companies -- that need to make profits -- can do to spur development in emerging markets?Gates: Companies make their contribution by both giving some cash to broad areas but also by having their products in their area of expertise be tailored and donated to people who are poor. So in the case of Microsoft, we went and got involved in putting PCs in libraries. We went to Chile to put PCs in the libraries there, so by having a really robust machine connected to the Internet, going through the training, working with the government, getting all the pieces right -- we learned how to do that in the United States -- those projects were incredibly successful.So while I admit for my Foundation the top priority is health, Microsoft is about software. It&#39;s got a product, that&#39;s what the company knows. And that&#39;s where, in its activities around the world, its helping educators, it&#39;s helping kids who have curiosity, and I think that&#39;s fantastic for Microsoft to do that.I&#39;m taking the success that Microsoft had and putting tens of billions of that into the basic needs where breakthroughs can be made -- and there, we&#39;ll be using software. We&#39;ll be using mobile phones, we&#39;ll doing data gathering, so we&#39;ll be using software as a tool to do it. I wish every company was doing as much as Microsoft is to take their expertise and look into that developing world and see what role they can play . We&#39;ve had great impact, great success, and it helps us attract better employees. It makes our employees feel good because we were founded on the idea of empowerment. We&#39;re not just talking about it, we&#39;re out in over a hundred countries delivering it in a significant way.
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At Storage Networking World yesterday, Dell President and CEO Kevin Rollins talked about his company's relationship with EMC and the development of standards to help users manage complex storage-area networks.
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By Richard Mullins, Tampa Tribune, Fla.  Feb. 2--TAMPA -- Tech Data Corp. is moving to enter the fast-growing European market for cell phones and wireless data links.
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Hitachi Data Systems, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard this week are trying to leapfrog EMC for enterprise-class storage leadership using pretty much the same product -- HDS&#39;s new TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform.
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Oracle, Dell, EMC and Intel have joined with other tech companies to create an industry standard for enterprise grid systems. &quot;Project MegaGrid&quot; will help maximize the use of computing resources, according to the group.
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(InfoWorld) - If Werner Heisenberg had pursued business analytics in the early 21st century instead of quantum physics in the early 20th, he might have struck on a different uncertainty principle: If your analysis and decision-making capabilities don't keep pace with the explosion of critical event data across enterprise networks today, soon you won't know the state of your business, the direction it's heading, or how fast it's getting there.Â  A host of technology companies are working on the science behind taking these measurements. Perhaps the newest of these event stream processing or complex event processing vendors is Amalgamated Insight, a Silicon Valley startup founded on work led by co-founder and CTO Michael Franklin at U.C. Berkeley, where Franklin is a professor of computer science. Amalgamated is just emerging from stealth mode and may have a new name by the time you read this. The seed of Amalgamated was planted in Franklin's frustration at what he considered wrong-headed approaches to the analysis problem. Many seemed to think that analyzing event streams -- be they RFID events from sensor networks, service events from SOA networks, system events from traditional networks, events from financial markets, or other kinds of electronic transactions -- was merely a matter of plumbing. If you could just get this device talking with that device, you would somehow enable pervasive computing. "And my view," Franklin recalls, "was that once you solved the plumbing problems, what you've got is a data management problem. Because you've got huge volumes of data being created all over the place. Lots of applications need that data, and lots of users need insight into what's going on in these dispersed environments." Beyond the plumbing, others were trying to reinvent the wheel. Attending an RFID standardization meeting as a guest, Franklin listened as group after group, each working at a different level of the system, described the data at their level and how to access it. And he realized, each one was defining a data model and a query language, and each one was different. That's when the seed sprouted. "Sitting there as a database guy, I was just getting irritated," he says. "Jeez, why wouldn't you just use SQL for all of this stuff across all the levels? And on the way home from that meeting, I realized, well, you know, why don't I just do that." Amalgamated's three-part solution combines a stream processing engine, a Java-based integration framework, and a visualization front end based on Adobe Flex. Naturally, the processing engine, which is embedded into the open-source PostgreSQL database, uses SQL to continuously query events as they flow past. "It lets you write SQL queries that are basically always running," Franklin explains. "They're always producing the answer so far based on the data they've seen so far." To enable SQL to query infinite data streams, Amalgamated extended it in two ways, adding a windowing capability to restrict the amount of data it would be exposed to in any instant and adding some "syntactic sugar" to define event patterns you might want to inspect. The "continuous analysis" engine is adaptive, Franklin says, meaning you can add or remove queries on the fly. Amalgamated sees the decision to embed the core processing engine in Postgres not only as key to advancing the development effort, but also as a key differentiator in the marketplace. Franklin notes that it gave the solution complete SQL, JDBC, and ODBC interfaces, internationalization, and all of the extensibility of Postgres right out of the box. As Boyd Pierce, the company's president and CEO, points out, Postgres lets users of Amalgamated's engine to write SQL that joins tables and streams, provides subqueries and views, and does all the magic that SQL can do. Programmers already know how to code in it. "We got all that based on having Postgres," Pierce notes. "But the other thing we've found in dealing with customers in our application space is that if you don't have a relational database that speaks full SQL and lets people program, you're hugely disadvantaged in terms of doing what the customer needs." Noting that Postgres allowed Amalgamated "to jump in front of a 10-year database systems development curve," Franklin sees a larger lesson in building on the open-source database. "We really hit upon what I think is the future of enterprise software development," he concludes. "If you start from scratch today, if you're building anything complex, you're crazy. That's just not going to be a viable way to build enterprise software in the future. You're going to have to leverage open source and other available tools that are out there."
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InfoWorld - After eight years at the company, Kevin Rollins was appointed president and CEO of the &#36;41.4 billion computer juggernaut Dell Computer last July. Many still think of Dell as a desktop supplier, but the company has become a powerhouse in server and notebooks as well and is making strong moves in the printer and storage markets.
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Wachovia is working on a project of staggering scope:&#160;a 3-D map of the firm&#39;s datacenter operations.The effort has been underway for about eight months, said Jacob Hall, a Wachovia vice president and head of the company&#39;s platform design and datacenter, technology products group.To generate the 3-D models, the financial services company is using geospatial data and also partnering with a pair of vendors, Tideway Systems and Intepoint, as well as the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, which has a visualization center.Tideway makes Foundation, a tool for mapping dependencies among applications and hardware, and this week released version 7.0 of the product. Intepoint&#39;s focus is on visualization and event simulation for IT systems.Right now, Wachovia is rendering 3-D models down to the level of individual servers in buildings, Hall said. Given enough data, the system could eventually generate even more detailed models, according to Hall.Wachovia hopes the project will provide better visualization of IT assets, their power consumption, and other details; the ability to identify &quot;critical nodes&quot; in the network; and the means to predict the business impact of various scenarios, such as a power outage in a city.The company also hopes the 3-D maps will help them run a&#160;greener IT department. &quot;This gives us the facts to go out and rearchitect our systems,&quot; Hall said.However, Wachovia is not collecting data in real time. That is largely unnecessary, Hall said. &quot;It would create too much traffic, and people would just try to shut it off. I think static snapshots are good enough.&quot; One future possibility could be to provide real-time data on demand, he said.Hall said there are plans to make the tool Web-based, allowing for integrations with other data types, such as IT trouble ticket information.Drue Reeves, vice president and director of datacenter strategies with Burton Group, said the value of modeling datacenters in 3-D form probably depends on an organization&#39;s size. &quot;I think it&#39;s for the larger enterprises. For the guys who have NOCs [network operations centers], it&#39;d be very useful. But I do wonder if it would be a little pricey for the average SMB,&quot; he said.Ultimately, Reeves noted, Wachovia&#39;s effort involves system visualization, not the actual instrumentation of IT devices: &quot;It&#39;s more for the person than the machine.&quot; But IT departments should consider any means that could help them run their operations more efficiently, he stressed.
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When it comes to storage technology, there are a number of vendors pushing back the frontiers in what is possible. This week Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), one of the giants in this extremely competitive space
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Pat Gelsinger, Intel's digital enterprise head, talks about tech in the developing world and the one-chip blade server of tomorrow.
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Stephen M. Bennett, Intuitâs chief executive, discussed forays into online banking, health care expense-management software and tax software.
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(InfoWorld) - The IT industry's thirst for energy is growing exponentially, far outpacing the supply of reliable, clean power. Now a group of leading IT firms has banded together to try to head off an impending energy crisis in the datacenter. Eleven enterprise heavyweights including Microsoft, IBM, Sun, HP, Intel, AMD, Rackable Systems, and VMWare announced Monday that they have formed a non-profit group called The Green Grid to drive new metrics, technology standards, and best practices for curbing power consumption. Robust growth in the IT sector and in companies' use of technology is leading to an acute power shortage, according to analyst firm Gartner. Half the worldâs datacenters will run out of power by the end of 2008, Gartner estimates. That means companies face swelling utility bills as they struggle to keep their servers cool and humming. Many of the companies participating in The Green Grid are individually developing energy-efficient technologies. However, joining forces to tackle the power-consumption problem holistically is a must, according to Green Grid board member Bruce Shaw, director of worldwide commercial and enterprise marketing at AMD. "No one player owns the kingdom. It's not just a processor problem. It's not just a server problem. It's not just a memory problem. Everyone in the ecosystem needs to be involved." By working together, Green Grid companies can develop ways for their respective greener technologies to "hook into one another," thus increasing their overall effectiveness, Shaw said. The consortium started work last April, with representatives for AMD, Sun, IBM, and HP getting the ball rolling. Not surprisingly, there have been challenges from the out start, including concerns about intellectual property and developing a standard way to measure power consumption   "Do you measure by performance per watt? Per dollar? Per thread? Something different?" said Green Grid boar member Colette LaForce, vice president of marketing at Rackable Systems.Â